DragonFly BSD 4.0 Released 66
An anonymous reader writes From the release page: 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, and a variety of other devices.
Difference versus FreeBSD? (Score:1)
I know that DragonFly BSD forked from FreeBSD about a decade ago. What are the major differences between DragonFly and FreeBSD?
Also what does the boot process look like?
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Is your finger broken?
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Wrong. That link is to the Dragonfly page itself. One click.
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Also what does the boot process look like?
They switched to systemd. kidding :)
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I have to admit that the Linux principle "do one thing and do it well" actually does work. Did some things need improvement? Yes. But systemd has become like a Cthulhu in the system, with tentacles everywhere, far beyond its original concept.
I have to agree with some others who have said that systemd resembles Windows a hell of a lot more than Linux.
Re:Difference versus FreeBSD? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Difference versus FreeBSD? (Score:5, Informative)
This... specifically the way he felt FreeBSD over complicated threads.
A simple implementation would be "every user space thread has a kernel thread". FreeBSD kind of went to the "lets give a lot of knobs and levers for people to play with." It went to something similar to the old Solaris multithreading model where you can say how many kernel threads for each user thread, or one kernel thread per app, or whatever combination. This added a lot of complexity. Ironically, this happened just as Solaris was moving to a much simpler 1:1 model.
Dillon was worried that it would make it so complicated that only a handful of people could do any coding in the kernel scheduler. This for very little gain as most people couldn't do anything useful with those knobs and levers. He was kind of proven right. FreeBSD kind of stalled out for a bit.
That was the initial reason for the break. Over time, the design diverged to where he added more message passing architecture in the kernel, inspired by the Amiga's design.
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/sys and /proc
remember that it's split in two places on Linix now. AND some knobs can use sysctl too on Linx
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In case you live under a rock, *BSD serves a third of the traffic on the internet.
Version number exceeds number of users... (Score:3)
I am one of them. Who are the other two?
No longer supports 32-bit architecture (Score:4, Informative)
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Hey, now that the systemd nutters have broken Linux we can go back to calling Unix Unix instead of *nix.
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*nix = all flavors of Unix
Micro$soft != all flavors of Windows
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What does Unix have to do with the Linux kernel? *nix is used for various "Unixes"
What's a "Unix"?
Is it a system based on AT&T code? If so, how much AT&T code has to still be in it.
Is it a system that passes the Single UNIX Specification test suite and whose supplier is thus allowed to license the "Unix" trademark?
Is it a system with a Unix-compatible API?
formerly also because of possible trademark issues. Linux is not one of them.
Linux is not one of the first types of OS in that list (if there are any bits of code AT&T made publicly available that are in Linux userlands, they're probably small enough not to count), and I know of no Linux distribu
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"THIS IS UNIX!" (forgive me Sparta...) (Score:5, Informative)
What's a "Unix"?
Is it a system based on AT&T code? If so, how much AT&T code has to still be in it.
Yes. Legally, all AT&T derived systems are grandfathered in as part of the License agreement which exclusively licensed the trademark to The Open Group for relicensing to third parties. For example, the transferrable SVR3 and SVR4 source licenses I own as a result of being sold surplus Class C computing equipment by Weber State University under their blanket source licenses mean my port of SVR3 to the Amiga I did for giggles, is legally UNIX.
Is it a system that passes the Single UNIX Specification test suite and whose supplier is thus allowed to license the "Unix" trademark?
Only if they subsequently license the trademark. If so, then it's UNIX. If they don't license the trademark, even if it passes the tests (which must also be licensed from The Open Group), or if they fail to register a compliance statement, and have it certified, it's not UNIX. Mac OS X, for example, is UNIX. iOS on the iPad, iPod Touch, and iPhone isn't UNIX -- and can't be; certain required interfaces are conditionally compiled out, as a space saving measure, and additional user space commands are not compiled for the publicly released versions.
Is it a system with a Unix-compatible API?
No. A system with a Unix-compatible API can pass the VSX, VSTH, and VSRT test suites, but unless the user space is there, it can't pass the VSC test suite, nor can it pass the compilation environment test suite, which include ISO C certification of the compiler and libraries, as well as passing negative assertion tests for namespace pollution on the header files (Linux/glibc/glibc2 have serious header file problems; so do the *BSDs). Android can't pass because it fails on threading API compliance with the VSTH test, partly because of the "Bionic" libc implementation having deficiencies (it would take a small amount of work to pass the VSX tests in that regard, but threads are the biggie).
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Thanks for posting that specific knowledge! Very informative, bookmarked.
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Hey, now that the systemd nutters have broken Linux we can go back to calling Unix Unix instead of *nix.
At least one trademarked Unix [opengroup.org] uses a launch-on-demand-based init daemon [apple.com], so it's not clear that the use of systemd-the-daemon is sufficient to make Linux not be a Un*x. Maybe systemd-the-software-bundle is sufficient.
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Hey, now that the systemd nutters have broken Linux we can go back to calling Unix Unix instead of *nix.
At least one trademarked Unix [opengroup.org] uses a launch-on-demand-based init daemon [apple.com], so it's not clear that the use of systemd-the-daemon is sufficient to make Linux not be a Un*x. Maybe systemd-the-software-bundle is sufficient.
It changes the user space sufficiently that the historical text configuration files for logging and other facilities no longer function compatibly with the VSC test suite. If those were changed back, or the test suite was somehow made independent of configuration variances for the purposes of testing, I might agree with you, but as it is, there is no way a systemd based system would pass VSC, and would also likely fail VSX, and the parts of the VSTH and VSRT testing, based on the posix_spawn implementation
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They all do if you count inetd(3).
That launches IP-based services, but I'm thinking of daemons that 1) run as process 1 and 2) launch most if not all services on-demand, rather than having stuff run from rc scripts.
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Solaris has their own init deamon, SMF. *BSD has their own, in fact Linux is the only one who have used SysVinit for several years now.
Yes, I'm aware of SMF. However, *BSD's init isn't different from traditional init - in fact, it's arguably closer to traditional init than is SysVinit, given that *BSD init is modeled after Research UNIX init, which predates the AT&T run-level-/etc/inittab-based init. They both use rc scripts to launch non-Internet system services, unlike launchd and systemd.
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The release anouncment makes it seem like they didn't have old or low end desktops in mind as their audience.
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Desktops and servers are hardly the entirety of the world. They don't even dominate it. Ever heard of ARM? If Linus felt that way about 32-bit, there would be no Android, or it would have to develop its own kernel. Sheesh. FreeBSD and linux are found in routers and such with very weak CPUs.
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Desktops and servers are hardly the entirety of the world. They don't even dominate it. Ever heard of ARM?
Yes, but I don't see any support for it, or any non-x86 architecture, in the DragonFly BSD source tree [dragonflybsd.org], so I don't think DragonFly BSD is that interested in embedded systems.
If Linus felt that way about 32-bit, there would be no Android, or it would have to develop its own kernel. Sheesh. FreeBSD and linux are found in routers and such with very weak CPUs.
So they've made different choices than DragonFly BSD.
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I don't think DragonFly BSD is that interested in embedded systems
ARM doesn't just mean 'embedded systems'. With the high-end ARM processors having 4 or more superscalar out-of-order cores, running at 1.5-2GHz, they're a very long way away from 'embedded'.
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Dragonfly BSD runs on ARM?
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No need to dumster dive. There are plenty of OSes that support i686 cpus. DragonFly targets high end amd64 servers. Not every OS needs to target everyone.
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Another OS that has dropped support for 32-bit architecture. This is probably not an issue for most users as 32-bit processors are less common these days. If you have an older machine with a 32-bit processor, you can't slap on the latest and greatest *nix OS.
PC-BSD also dropped 32-bit support a year ago.
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And FreeBSD tells you that 32-bit will hamstring ZFS, so if you want the good stuff on FreeBSD it's 64 bits for you.
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This only applies in the PC world, which means it applies to FreeBSD. But there are BSD alternatives that like to target more than PCs where 32-bit CPUs are more common.
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I have a 64bit processor on my laptop, but I elected to go back to a 32bit OS because I decided that having more free RAM is more important to me than the 64bit advantages. All my VMs use 32bit OSes even on 64bit hosts for the same reason. So its not just for older machines.
But does it support Haswell graphics? (Score:2)
From the release page: 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, and a variety of other devices.
I'm not sure if it supports Haswell graphics or not. Can someone look in to that for me?
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ding ding ding! We have a WINNER!!!
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Fuck FreeBSDgirl (Score:1)
Because of her humongous shittiness and discrimination related work on Twitter, the FreeBSD name has gone into disrepute.
Please sack her or tell her to rename her handle to freeBS-girl.
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Netcraft weighs in (Score:1)
Seriously? This deep in the thread? And nobody's gone for the classic? Fine, I'll get it started...
It is now official. Netcraft has confirmed: *BSD is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known