DragonFly BSD Releases Version 2.0 43
An anonymous reader writes "DragonFly BSD 2.0 has been released!
It includes HAMMER, DragonFly's brand-new file system supporting advanced features like history, snapshots and various other cool things. Will it become the new ZFS?
Since it is BSD licensed it could also be integrated into various other operating systems."
VirtualBox? (Score:3, Informative)
Did anyone manage to get the live cd work on VirtualBox? On my Ubuntu box it seems to hang once I get to the screen with various options of booting DragonFly. :|
Re:Another filesystem? (Score:5, Informative)
No, because a bunch of douchebags keep making them all under licences which do not allow for proper intergration into other operating systems and because HAMMER is designed for distributed filesystem work, a field where there are limited existing systems.
Re:VirtualBox? (Score:5, Informative)
VirtualBox has some issues [virtualbox.org] with FreeBSD.
I tried to install a recent release of FreeBSD which ended up in frequent hangs related to the network adapter.
Changing the network adapter type seems to fix the problem.
bsdtalk interview with Matthew Dillon (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Another filesystem? (Score:5, Informative)
So whose fault is that? ZFS has been and continues to be adopted by other operating systems. The GPL is a manifestation of a polical agenda and the inability to incorporate ZFS is a consequence. That is Linux's problem, not the folks that release their open-source filesystems under the licenses of their choosing.
Just because somebody doesn't buy into Stallman's agenda doesn't mean they are a douchebag.
Description of Hammer (Score:3, Informative)
Matt has posted a very in-depth PDF whitepaper describing the Hammer filesystem [backplane.com]. A very interesting read!
Re:VirtualBox? (Score:3, Informative)
As far as we can tell VirtualBox does not properly emulate the 8254, which we use for timer interrupts. We run it in a different mode then linux does and my guess is that VB doesn't emulate that mode.
People have told me that DFly does run under VMWare and MS virtualization and QEmu. And natively, of course.
-Matt
Re:Another filesystem? (Score:4, Informative)
Ignoring the license for the moment, ZFS has a lot of desirable features. But it also tries to throw in the kitchen sink, far more then I personally believe a file-system should deal with. I haven't tried it myself so I don't know how well it performs.
HAMMER takes a different approach to redundancy. HAMMER is eventually intended to operate in a replicated multi-master clustered environment. The first release only has the beginnings of that work (aka single-master/multi-slave replication), but the basic principle that HAMMER follows is that no single copy of a file-system can ever be considered safe, no matter how much redundancy you throw into it. Software bugs are far more likely to corrupt a file-system then hardware issues.
Up until now snapshots have always been fairly expensive affairs. They run the gauntlet from outright dangerous in UFS to fairly quick in ZFS, but of all the OSS offerings only HAMMER gives you a fine-grained (~30-60 second interval if you don't lift a finger) historical access to the entire filesystem. All you need is a transaction id and you cd directory@@transaction_id and, poof, you are looking at a file or the entire filesystem as of some point in the past. You have full administrative control over what historical data is kept and what is thrown away, independent for each of your mirrors, backup systems, whatever.
After all, we need to justify getting those cheap, terrabyte+ drives coming out now!
-Matt