DragonFlyBSD Team Interviewed 39
lowks writes "A nice little interview from the ONLamp BSD advocacy page where we get to peer a little into the goings ons and updates as well as plans for DragonFlyBSD. Highlights include the rationale behind DragonFlyBSD and peeks into the current engine as well as goodies planned to be implemented in the future versions. DragonFlyBSD is another flavour of BSD which forked from the FreeBSD 4.x branch not too long ago. It's headed by Matt Dillon, who forged out on his own and started DragonFlyBSD due to technical differences with the FreeBSD team ."
New BSD Commercial Development Company (Score:3, Informative)
From reading through the site site the operating system looks very interesting. They already have a large client base, with some very respectable companies listed. I think I'll order a copy and at least give it a try as FreeBSD 4.x is wh
Re:New BSD Commercial Development Company (Score:1, Insightful)
Astroturfers-R-Us
Come on, who on slashdot says:
"I think I'll order a copy and at least give it a try"
My advice is to look at the damage done to the JBoss team after being caught astroturfing. If you want to promote your stuff, great but be up front about it. OK?
OnLamp -- Hit or Miss (Score:5, Insightful)
Or I suppose it could be that I'm mildly interested in Dragonfly and I think Matt et all have a strong argument in LWKT.
Hmmm now I wonder what sort of SMP strategy is used in OS X??
Re:OnLamp -- Hit or Miss (Score:5, Informative)
Mac OS X relies on XNU (modified Mach 3.0 + BSD) for SMP. As far as I know, it uses a mutex model (like linux, freebsd, & netbsd).
Mac OS X SMP [usenix.org]Re:OnLamp -- Hit or Miss (Score:2)
It will be interesting to how things evolve...
I must admit SMP on OS X works OK fine for me and most of my coding experience is for smaller members of the ppc family (4XX) so I have no basis for informed opinion but Dragonfly "feels" like a good idea.
Best part there is not much keeping off my Power Mac if it really does work!
Re:*BSD is dying (Score:2, Informative)
Turns out that *BSD is stronger than ever!
According to an Inernetnews article [internetnews.com], Netcraft has confirmed that *BSD has "dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
There has been a steady increase in *BSD developers over the past decade.
There are currently 307 FreeBSD developers as of the 2004 core team election. [freebsd.org]
You can read more about FreeBSD here [freebsd.org]
If you would like to try out a BSD, you can download: FreeBSD [freebsd.org], OpenBSD [openbsd.org], NetBSD [netbsd.org], or DragonflyBSD [dragonflybsd.org]
Enjoy!
Re:The reason there are so many BSDs is (Score:4, Insightful)
Please. There are what, 300 different Linux distros?
Guess what, different people have different goals and needs. Matt Doollon wanted to implement SMP in a different way than his (then) fellow FreeBSD developers had envisioned. NetBSD guys want to run on every platform out there. OpenBSD is about security.
Go back to your cave if you have nothing to contribute, but don't tell people what to do with their free time.
Mike Bouma
Re:The reason there are so many BSDs is (Score:4, Funny)
Since we can safely assume that the *BSD developers are running their own OS, this implies that the 5 developers are very, very productive! So all the thousands of GNU/Linux kernel hackers quite simply can't match the quality, stability and speed of what is done by the 5 (five) *BSD hackers. By the way, the *BSD hackers has to develop userland in addition to kernel work ;-)
Re:The reason there are so many BSDs is (Score:2)
I think that you even can assume that at least two of those five developers are running more than their own BSD, and maybe even a Linux distribution on the side.
Technical differences? (Score:1, Interesting)
I listened to Dillon's crap on the -current mailing list and elsewhere. 'Technical differences' were the least of the concerns in getting rid of him.
Sure, he's competent, and he's contributed some great things to FreeBSD over the years, but that doesn't mean he's not a troll.
Re:Technical differences? (Score:1, Insightful)
Then, why Mr. AC, haven't people like David O'Brien , Dag-Erling Smorgav or Poul-Henning Kamp been kicked out of FreeBSD yet? They're as prone to flamewars as Dillon was, probably even more.
Mike Bouma
Re:Technical differences? (Score:3, Insightful)
I personally think that even if Matt had not lost his FreeBSD commit bit, he might have started DragonFly anyways. DF is an excellent vehicle for trying out some new architectural approaches to problems that are just fundamentally different from FreeBSD 5 was/is doing.
New BSD on the block (Score:4, Interesting)
Who knows, someday the BSD world might break up lke this:
OpenBSD is for Routers and firewalls
NetBSD is for XBox/Toaster/microwave/everything else =P
FreeBSD is for Servers
and
DragonBSD is for SSI Supercomputers or other highly scalable systems.
Re:New BSD on the block (Score:5, Insightful)
This might come as a surprise for you, but all of the BSD are general purpose OS, even though they have different focus. There are quite a few OpenBSD servers out there, just as there are quite a few FreeBSD firewalls and routers, and the same goes for NetBSD. NetBSD has even set the TCP speed record over "the pond".
Why, always...? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yet Another *BSD? (Score:1, Insightful)
How many 'user-friendly' Linuxes do we have? How many of those are just Redhat? How many are just Debian? You speak of splitting the community being bad, yet the Linuxes seem to devide more rapidly than cancer, and it looks to be working for them.
How many webservers are there? How many mail servers? DNS servers? I am not talking about how many are popular, I am talking how many are out t