DragonFly BSD 3.0 Released 102
An anonymous reader writes with word of the release earlier this week, after eight months of development, of DragonFly BSD 3.0. The release includes improved scalability through finer-grained locking, improvements to the HAMMER file system in low-memory configurations, and a TrueCrypt-compatible disk encryption system. DragonFly is an installable system, but it can also be run live from CD, DVD, or USB key.
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Is there a torrent? My internet sucks - I prefer torrents, which I can throttle. When I'm downloading ISO's the wife bitches, the kids bitch, yada yada yada. Torrents are great, I set them at 20 k/s and no one complains - much.
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Well - if I get it downloaded, I might answer some of your questions, LOL!
I guess I'll wait til the wife goes to bed tonight, and start the download running. Unless she goes to town later today. Whatever. I plan to run it in a virtual machine, just to play with. I could decide to install it on hardware, if it's really nice.
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Obviously substitute the url for which ever one you decide to actually d/l, but the following ought to work:
wget --limit-rate=20k http://www.dragonflybsd.org/download/#index1h1 [dragonflybsd.org]
Re:Will Try it (Score:5, Informative)
I administer three UNIX servers, all FreeBSD, and here's what I can tell you about the differences between it and Linux and Windows Server (which are also decent server OSes):
YMMV, Im sure many people here maintain great Linux servers, but for my humble needs I really like my three FreeBSD servers.
Re:Will Try it (Score:4, Informative)
The ports system is also available on Linux; The pkgsrc system (that is used by DragonFly and NetBSD) is available for both Linux and Solaris.
PF is an awesome user-friendly firewall, but it has its limitations on high traffic systems (pf isn't multi-core friendly). Probably NPF will be an option soon.
The documentation is existing, up-to-date and usually accurate.
For servers, there are 4 key awesome technology components ATM - Jails (Linux has namespaces, but I don't know if it's funcional yet), CARP (pf-based redundancy), ZFS and HAST (somewhat equivalent do DRDB).
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FreeBSD changes quite a lot between major releases, but usually doesn't break/remake what already exists. There are some few exceptions.
There is work in the FreeBSD world fixing this. Hopefully by 9.2 or so we will see the fruits of the effort.
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BSD is very user friendly - its just kind of selective about who its friends are!
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One question - what does DragonFly BSD offer that FreeBSD doesn't? For instance, PC-BSD too is a FreeBSD derivative, fine-tuned for use as a desktop, w/ a choice of user interfaces, a new PBI packaging system, USB3 support and so on. So I can see a desktop BSD user prefering PC-BSD to FreeBSD. What sort of BSD users would want to use DragonFly over FreeBSD? Ones that have SMP systems?
One thing I understand about BSDs is that there are commands that are applicable across distros, and that the sticking
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Also - forgot to discuss this:
"
For instance, PC-BSD too is a FreeBSD derivative, fine-tuned for use as a desktop, w/ a choice of user interfaces, a new PBI packaging system, USB3 support and so on. So I can see a desktop BSD user prefering PC-BSD to FreeBSD. What sort of BSD users would want to use DragonFly over FreeBSD? Ones that have SMP systems?
"
This is not an 'apples to apples' comparison - PC-BSD is basically a FreeBSD 'distribution' -
FreeBSD base OS rebuilt with added user-friendly features that you
DragonFly vs. OpenBSD? (Score:2)
OpenBSD has a fanatical devotion to security, and a rather prickly-looking fish. But other than access to more hardware drivers, why would I want to run DragonFly instead of OpenBSD? Sure, a faster file system is nice, but basically anything these days is a lot faster than SunOS 4.3 (my last serious BSD use), and it sounds like it's friendlier to install. I can see why I might want to run NetBSD occasionally, because I might have a toaster or wristwatch that needs a better OS, but the big attraction of t
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umm -
the changlog contains many 'why you should care' type of things, and also a link to many 'what is the point' types of pages -
so - sounds to me like you are complaining about your own laziness
r.e. 'distros' - 99% of linux 'distros' are just repackaging of the same software using the same tools with a different default set of packages to stroke some teenyboppers ego - nothing new that you couldn't do with another by running a few yums or apt-gets
this is novel software, that you can 'only get here', and c
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From my take as a user and dev - dragonfly is targeted towards people that care about these features.
I use DragonFly on my key desktops / laptop / etc. Works just fine. Yes, some rough edges in places, but nothing I cant fix or live with - and some very smooth spots that aren't there elsewhere (like the features you mention). Having vkernels / jails / hammer allows for some excellent system managment features which can help sw development / testing / etc, plus the small group allows for a less disorienting
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Coming from a user of both Linux and both FreeBSD and NetBSD, I can't agree with the absolutes of your post.
BSDs are never easier than Linux. Linux is more modern, while BSDs stick to "tradition" and take pride in keeping things complicated. Just read their manuals/handbooks and you will have a pretty good idea.
An alternate wording: "Linux engages in constant superfluous redesign, while BSDs stick to conventional but consistent, stable interfaces that are well documented". The fact that up-to-date man pages and well-written manuals/guides exist says a lot by itself. Linux's myriad of ever-obsolete HOW-TOs is a poor substitute.
One good example of a painful process in Linux that is easy in (Net)BSD is devel
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Sure, you can. But UUIDs are the default behavior in many distributions (fortunately, 'blkid' will tell you the mapping between /dev entry and UUID). I'm not saying it's a bad system. My point is that the parent's complaint about naming conventions in /dev is silly -- there are generally good reasons for each system's behavior. The complaint distracts the discussion from what's actually important.
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Linux allows a wide range of contributors with, at least for some distros, not much quality control. This allows rapid development.
Licence differences mean that *BSD is more likely to be used commercially - and provides a lot of infrastructure and embedded environments - so by definition it is the standard in many areas.
Linux is more contributor fri
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Unlike Linux, BSD has plenty of commercial apps available - no arguments about tainting the kernel as the BSD license allows for that, so support is available for that app. BSD Tends to be very stable between releases with a longer release cycle. This helps commercial software apps as they can target a specific version and Know it will work unlike linux where you have so many different versions of the LFSHS or even what's supposed to be installed by default. BSD is the Unix Standard - means that if you writ
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One question - if NBSD is supposed to be this most portable BSD out there, how does one explain that FBSD has been available on the Itanium platform for a while, whereas only recently w/ 5.1 does NBSD have a port there, and that too, only in source code form, not binary downloads?
Also, would FBSD plus OpenSSH be a good substitute for OBSD should one want both the stability and performance of FBSD as well as the wide peripheral support? Maybe this is unrelated, but to what extent would Capsicum help FBSD
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Quite simply - because someone ported it to FreeBSD first. Doesn't at all 'prove' the portability question -
FreeBSD: 6 architectures - with support for alpha having been *dropped*
NetBSD: 8x 'tier 1 architectures' and 49 'tier 2' architectures -> 57 architectures. Its like freaking Heinz Ketchup -
57 varieties - goes on anything!
As for:
"
FBSD plus OpenSSH be a good substitute for OBSD should one want both the stability and performance of FBSD as well as the wide peripheral support?
"
OpenSSH ru
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Looks like you're right on cpu families- however:
And how many of those m68k / mips / arm / etc. sub architectures that you so smoothly dismissed run on Linux?
they are separate 'ports' for a reason in netbsd . Personally, I'd think the important factor in 'counting' these is 'platforms' supported rather than CPU's
also r.e portability:
can you cross compile one from another, or even from another os simply from a checkout of the codebase without manually bootstrapping a toolchain?
r.e 'hack' - last I checked th
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And......?
That silly semantic game is an advantage how exactly?
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And......?
That silly semantic game is an advantage how exactly?
It isn't.
The difference is more than semantic though, but it's hard to call one 'more free' than the other.
Short answer : GPL is liberalism . BSD is libertarianism .
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Short answer : GPL is liberalism . BSD is libertarianism .
So as the OP said, one isn't free and one is.
GPL vs BSD (Score:3)
Both are free in cost and use, but only Linux is Free.
The GPL license, which the Linux kernel is under, limits the freedom of developers to limit the freedom of other developers to make use of changes from derived code. This is effectively done when Developer A takes GPL'd code from Developer B to benefit from Developer B's work. If distributing the derived work, Developer A must release any changes made to Developer B's work so that other developers, including Developer B, ARE also in turn Free to benefi
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The GPL isn't "enforcing freedom" or some such... The code you copied will always be free, as is, forever, whatever the license.
What the GPL does is extract a tax... If you want to distribute modified versions, you have to pay the code tax... Sure, others before you paid the same tax, but that doesn't mean forcing you to pay it is "freedom". You can claim it's apropos, and a small price to pay if you want... But calling restrictions "freedom" is the most flagrant orwellian doublespeak crap I've ever he
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And BSD limits the freedom of users.
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Troll or not? Hard to tell. No real sarcasm. Explanation is well composed but opposite of the summary
Linux is free. Its developers are not.
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My apologies for the confusion, I forgot to hyperlink. By "...but only Linux is Free", I meant that when compared to BSD variants, only Linux is Free software as in the following definition:
"Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients have the same rights under which it
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"Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients have the same rights under which it was obtained and that manufacturers of consumer products incorporating free software provide the software as source code. The word free in the term free software refers to freedom (liberty) a
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There, finished that for you. It's longer but more accurate.
= 9J =
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No such thing. The first amendment only says the government can't restrict your freedom of speech.
As a private citizen, I have every right to kick you off my property, shout over you, deface/remove your signs, fire you from your job if I don't like what you have to say, refuse to serve you as a customer, etc, etc., all things limiting your freedom of speech in a very real way that the first amendment do
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And, not only others like the Federal Government, but also others like State Goverments, County Governments, and City Governments. Hopefully a few concrete examples is more illustrative than the more abstracted "others".
Yes, even you are restricted in your freedom to restrict the freedom of others. In turn, you are more free as the same restriction applies to others in that
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Not really. It's just incomplete.
The GPL and the BSD each allow an option to restrict freedom.
IF:
Developer B has modified some code that was under the GPL.
THEN:
The GPL restricts Developer A from restricting the freedom of other developers to access, to use, and to modify the code to which Developer A had the freedom to access, to use, and to modify from Developer B's modification. This restriction is only IF Developer A chooses the option to distribute the derived changes.
IF:
Developer B has modified some
Re:Will Try it (Score:5, Insightful)
The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, et al, would have to go through an official and formal certification w/ the Open Group in order to be certified as Unix. I don't doubt that they'd pass, but then, I don't doubt that Linux would pass either. That too, every version would have to be certified separately. I doubt that any distro would want to go thru the expense of doing it, and so the only certified Unixes out there are the ones like Solaris, HP/UX, AIX and OS-X.
The licensing issue is also somewhat tangential here - if a BSD has something that Linux hasn't, a customer will have no issues working w/ BSD, since BSD code can be incorporated in and released as a part of anything from proprietary to GPL3 software. If Linux has something that BSD hasn't, customers who need it will work around it, like Google did w/ Android. On the Linux side, I can see it getting confusing, since Linux is not going to become GPL3, but the things it uses - glibc, gcc, etc have become GPL3, which is a source for potential confusion.
Aside from that, I agree w/ the others like kestasjk below - few will care about whether it's genuine Unix or genuinely free software.
Re:Will Try it (Score:4, Insightful)
I tell you what, the BSDs would be a lot more likely to pass than Linux, as they're directly descended from the AT&T unix code base, and continue to do things the "Unix way". Mac OS X (largely FreeBSD userland) has been certified as Unix. Linux is a clusterfuck of NIH syndrome and GPL software that is often different for the sake of being different.
And the GPL is NOT free. It contains restrictions on what others can do with the code you release (i.e., they can't close it). Just because you might not like the possibility of code being closed, restricting people from doing that is not more free than allowing people to do anything with it.
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GPL'd software is...
"Free software, software libre or libre software [...] that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients have the same rights under which it was obtained and that manufacturers of consumer products incorporating free software provide the software as source code. The word free in the term free
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This is true for GPL and BSD.
This is true for the BSD in that it allows the developer who modifies someone else's work to restrict the freedom of other developers, including the original developer, to access and modify to the derived work even if it is distributed.
The GPL would restrict the freedom of the developer from restricting the freedom of other develo
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It's up to developer of the original work to decide which type of behavior to allow based on the license.
The GPL only limits the freedom of the developer borrowing the original work if they decide to take the option of distributing the work, whether it was modified or not.
Another question would be, why should the developer who borrowed someone else's work consider himself the owner if he simply modifies it?
Or, another way to s
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....... and so the only certified Unixes out there are the ones like Solaris, HP/UX, AIX and OS-X.
And Tru64 UNIX. IIRC it received the branding ahead of the others mentioned above.
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Looking @ their home page [dragonflybsd.org], it looks like this is a FreeBSD geared @ multiprocessing sytems, not your usual made for home users desktops or laptops.
It's a funny thing though, isn't it? When Matt Dillon began the fork, multi-core technology was only just getting started. If you had multiple cores or multiple CPUs, it was in a server. These days, just about every laptop or home desktop has more than one core. An OS written to scale across multiple CPUs certainly has an advantage on those platforms.
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wget --limit-rate=20k --continue http://mirror-master.dragonflybsd.org/iso-images/dfly-i386-3.0.1_REL.iso.bz2
If you don't have wget, get it. You can get it for pretty much anything. Linux. Other Unixes. Windows. OS/2 Warp. Macs. Android. 20 year old Amigas. Atari STs. Commodore 64s.
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Obviously, if I had bothered with the man pages, I could have figured this out. Thank you, AC, for helping a lazy old man!
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wget has a speed limit option that works well.
More than that, you should look into prioritizing ACKs or changing the queuing method on your router and never have the problem again.
Not the big one (Score:4, Interesting)
This release is interesting, but the rest of the year is dedicated to HAMMER2 and that will be the real story with DragonFly next. Most of the work on this release was incremental. Some interesting benchmarks were posted against FreeBSD in the last few months for PostgreSQL. There was some coverage on OSNews on this
http://www.osnews.com/story/25334/DragonFly_BSD_MP_Performance_Significantly_Improved [osnews.com]
Re:Not the big one (Score:5, Informative)
If you're writing stories about DragonFly, then you want to cover all of it's distributed systems. The whole point of DragonFly is getting it ready for clustering. That's what Matt Dillon is into.
Some of the features of HAMMER & HAMMER2 are duplicated in other file systems, but most of them have much less friendly licenses. Even ZFS is under CDDL, which isn't terrible but precludes it from being used in Linux (the kernel). From my perspective, HAMMER could be the file system that everyone could use due to the license.
HAMMER is clearly the biggest feature of DragonFly that originated there. I think that constitutes coverage.
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Re:Not the big one (Score:5, Informative)
Your benchmark compares HAMMER, ZFS, UFS, and EXT, when really HAMMER is most similar to ZFS. And in the benchmark, those two are pretty similar. The difference between the two: ZFS expects virtually unlimited RAM and will consume GBs easily; HAMMER will work with as little as 256MB of RAM.
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Does HAMMER have unusable performance in the event of apps using fsync() or if somebody is using virtualization? BTRFS might be usable some day but it's not today. (I run ZFS for important work and have BTRFS on my desktop for real-world testing).
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Every open-source filesystem to-date has had serious pitfalls. Very serious pitfalls. In the Linux space it comes down to either significant bugs under heavy loads or extremely poor performance. I don't use Linux in production myself but I have several friends that do and they have yet to find any solution that doesn't occasionally explode in their faces. People talk about a lot of these linux filesystems as if they were the best thing since sliced bread but that's really only on paper. Every linux fil
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(I'd give you mod points if I had any. Since I don't, I'm going to ask a silly question.)
I'm not familiar with either HAMMER1 or HAMMER2, but will migrating to a HAMMER2 FS require a backup and restore, or is the HAMMER1 FS compatible/migratable? I realize that, as HAMMER2 is in development, you might not have a clear answer, but I thought I'd ask anyway.
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If it doesn't have these above features it will be a deal-breaker at least for me.
Other things that I miss in some of these file systems are; defrag (even ZFS has potential fragmentation issues), the possibility to convert
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what about the filesystems? afaik there is no ext(2,3,4) support in the BSDs, is it? so my LUKS-Ext4 FS will still be useless on BSD.
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not ported, yet?
Sorry, my last information was, there is no ext3/4 support. For ext3 it would be possible to remove the journal, converting ext4 to ext3 seems to be harder. Anyway, for dualboot i do want to have at least ext3 on my linux, so the bsd would need to provide at least ext3, too.
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And, last I checked, TrueCrypt is very strong with Microsoft users (as probably BSD/Linux users have other strong alternatives already in the base system), so I really don't understand your problem.
good guy; bad choice (Score:1, Interesting)
Matt Dillon's a fairly bright guy who made the mistake in the mid-'90s of trying to get involved with the bunch of elitist has-beens on the FreeBSD core team. The reason the BSDs have been festering for the past decade is that there is and never has been any interest in properly documenting and welcoming contributions - the only way you can really make a contribution is to play the sycophant to one of the core team and act as their personal ego stroker until they act as your mentor, moulding you into a less
Re:good guy; bad choice (Score:4, Informative)
Dillon left the team and started working on DragonFlyBSD.
It is interesting, all this years later, that it seems Dillon was right. According to the Dfly 2.13 benchmarks, FreeBSD and DFly are close enough to be considered equivalents, and with DFly taking a lead in some tests. AFAIK PostgreSQL isn't threaded so for at least process-based applications, both Dillon's vision and the FreeBSD team turned out to be equivalent. (But the "breaking of things" and funcionality that started with the 5.0 branch was a huge long-term benefit, as it forced the reimplementation of key infrastructure components - network, storage, etc).
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The reason the BSDs have been festering for the past decade
As a FreeBSD user since 3.4, I resent that statement. Just recently I was trying to get a FreeBSD domU working on XenServer... 7.x was unusable; 8.x was a little better but still unusable/unstable.. but 9.0 works and has been stable (with a couple of minor problems). It's only 2012, and FreeBSD already has near production-quality virtualization. FreeBSD is really on the cutting edge of this 'virtualization' tech...
And just a couple of major versions ago, we got BINARY UPDATES.
Things are getting really excit
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As an off-and-on FreeBSD user since prior to version 3, I must say that the whole tree has been full of new and interesting things that actually for well over a decade...and that Linux still reigns as king of the "free" *NIX crowd.
I cut my teeth on *nix in the mid-90s using the FreeBSD shell machines at the former io.com (while I myself had a modem and Telemate under MS-DOS), and while I was a customer of theirs they slowly started introducing Linux shells but their Linux boxen were never as stable or featu
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My post was written tongue-in-cheek... I've been using FBSD on my servers for years, and on my desktop since 3.4 until 6 months ago. Honestly, trying to get FreeBSD working on Xen was the first time I really wondered about where the project was going. They're 10+ years late to the party.. for a server OS to miss the move to virtualized servers... Other than that, FreeBSD is a great server OS.
The installer in 9.0 is disappointing.. they switched from sysinstall to a new installer "bsdinstall".. but bsdinstal
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Everything you say is true, but: Compared to Gentoo, FreeBSD can be a joy to operate. :)
I never toyed with Redhat or its derivatives, due to an ephemeral dislike for RPM that has yet to fade.
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Everything you say is true, but: Compared to Gentoo, FreeBSD can be a joy to operate. :)
lol
I've noticed Gentoo isn't used much on servers either
I never toyed with Redhat or its derivatives, due to an ephemeral dislike for RPM that has yet to fade.
There are some big downsides to RHEL.. I'm not a huge fan of the distro.. but 10 years of support(!)
It's pretty much the only distro that is supported for a decent amount of time. FBSD: 2 years. Debian: 2 years. Fedora/SUSE: 1-1.5 years. Who wants to upgrade their server every 1-2 years?
Ubuntu LTS is 3 years on the desktop and 5 years on the server.. but they focus so much on the desktop that I have some doubts that it would be a good server choice.
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I used to use Gentoo on a mail server just because Portage was a rapidly-updated system at the time and it let me keep the small handful of world-facing software that it used updated easily and quickly
But without care and feeding, it falls down on its face after a few years of piecemeal updates. It eventually became easier to migrate to a whole different system than to perform all of the myriad of weird, seemingly unrelated system updates that break -everything- if they're not installed in the right order.
Single OS Image Across Multiple Systems? (Score:2)
The DFBSD Goals page [dragonflybsd.org] is now empty. Hmm.
I seem to recall that at one point the goal was an OS that ran as a single OS image across multiple machines [lwn.net]. Memory, processes, storage, etc. was unified into a single OS image. Is that still a DFBSD goal?
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