DragonFly BSD 4.8 released

https://www.dragonflybsd.org/release48/

by ceratopisan • 9 years ago

167 34 9 years ago

geff82• 9 years ago

Anyone using DragonFly BSD in production? Or as a desktop system? What is your experience? I love the BSDs, but never used DragonFly.

PeCaN2• 9 years ago

I run a little VPS on DragonFlyBSD that I use for misc hobby projects and personal file hosting. Mostly it runs Postgres. It's quite fast. I had redis running on there as a message queue for a distributed web crawler for a while. I benchmarked it against Arch Linux (which is what I was using on that server before DragonFly) and it was somewhat faster.

HAMMER is a really nice filesystem. It's not one of the fancy COW filesystems (HAMMER2 is, though), but it still has built-in versioning and snapshots and a host of other features. It's great for storing personal projects on.

It's also rock solid and easy to tinker with. I've recompiled my kernel several times with various configs and patches. It is probably the easiest production-ready OS to hack around with.

Also #dragonflybsd on efnet is super helpful.

voltagex_• 9 years ago

What benchmarks showed an improvement between Arch and DragonFlyBSD?

ky738• 9 years ago

I wanna know that too. Never heard of anyone using it in production.

ianai• 9 years ago

The hammer FS might be its main improvement. I think it's, right now, an exercise in maintaining options.

patrickg_zill• 9 years ago

I have used it on 1 server as a test. Worked pretty well, did a few NFS exports from it to other servers. Has been up 546 days, running v4.3 of the OS. No complaints, but I haven't tested it under high load.

tiffanyh3• 9 years ago

In case people are wondering what makes DBSD so interesting, DragonflyBSD is:

- focused only on x64 architecture

- has an extremely small but exceptionally talented team of developers (e.g. Matt Dillon from DICE and Amiga fame)

- has it's own unique filesystem called Hammer (and work is being down on Hammer2 which is a complete rewrite)

- Network performance is particularly good with Dragonfly and even better than FreeBSD which is known as being the golf standard for network performance [1]

[1] https://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~sephe/perf_cmp.pdf

Edit: formatting

Edit2: it should also be noted in the release notes, it refers to detailed NVME disk performance testing the Dragonfly team performed. These results are largely agnostic of what OS you run. Really interesting to see the Samsung NVME device come out on top and Intel in last. This is a good read even if you don't run Dragonfly.

http://apollo.backplane.com/DFlyMisc/nvme_randread.txt

AtticusTheGreat• 9 years ago

I know you probably meant "gold standard" but I was amused thinking about what a golf standard might mean ;)

akerro• 9 years ago

Why do you assume he meant "gold standard"? Have you ever seen how fast a golf ball flies just after a strong hit?

djsumdog• 9 years ago

I just assumed "golf standard" was some QA term I hadn't heard of before.

eternalban• 9 years ago

- has it's own unique filesystem called Hammer (and work is being down on Hammer2 which is a complete rewrite)

You said "interesting", but superficially "a complete rewrite" WIP doesn't sound like a plus when choosing a production system OS.

If anyone is interested, this is what the DBSD man page says about hammer:

     HAMMER file systems are designed for large storage systems, up to 1
     Exabyte, and will not operate efficiently on small storage systems.  The
     minimum recommended file system size is 50GB.  HAMMER must reserve 512MB
     to 1GB of its storage for reblocking and UNDO/REDO FIFO.  In addition,
     HAMMER file systems operating normally, with full history retention and
     daily snapshots, do not immediately reclaim space when files are deleted.
     A regular system maintenance job runs once a day by periodic(8) to handle
     reclamation.

     HAMMER works best when the machine's normal workload would not otherwise
     fill the file system up in the course of 60 days of operation.

And what appears to be the original design doc for Hammer by Dillon: https://www.dragonflybsd.org/hammer/hammer.pdf

[& p.s.] Hammer2: http://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git/blob/b93cc2e081...

tiffanyh3• 9 years ago

In all fairness to Dragonfly, Apple themselves just today released an entirely new file systems that was a complete rewrite as well.

With the advent of SSD and NVME, how you achieve maximum performance and ensure long term "disk" endurance has radically changed in recent years. You're no long write data to a physical platter anymore. Which radically changes huge fundamental assumptions in how legacy file systems were created 30-40 years ago.

So don't view a rewrite as a bad thing. It's Dragonfly being proactive and keeping up with the times.

cat1992• 9 years ago

Hammer1 is a log-structured snapshottable data filesystem with near-live master:slave replication, similar to e.g. zfs/btrfs, with very low memory requirements.

Hammer2 will, last I checked, enable multi-master clustered volumes plus replicated fanout mirrors and caching clients at the base system level (e.g. not an overlay application like other systems)

While there is a focus on keeping releases as stable as possible and the tip of the source tree stable, it is heavily under development so some amount of low-level expertise is probably a good idea.. which isn't to say you can't use it for day-to-day use.

Systems are used for different things - one being heavily under development doesn't necessarily mean it isn't suitable for some use cases

fnj• 9 years ago

HAMMER2 has been worked on for at least 6 years; AFAICT by one guy. Every year it is supposed to be happening Real Soon Now, but never appears to make any evident progress.

Matt Dillon does very impressive work, but the critical mass just isn't there.

mjn• 9 years ago

It's possibly too big a task for one person, I agree. If he manages to get something usable in even 10-15 years, though, I'd be impressed. HAMMER2 is a clustering file system with POSIX semantics, and by the standards of that category, I don't think it's going all that slowly, to be honest. Ceph has had probably hundreds of person-years of development put into it, and only very recently have people started claiming CephFS is production-ready (and still many don't trust it).

mozumder2• 9 years ago

Really interesting to see the Samsung NVME device come out on top and Intel in last. This is a good read even if you don't run Dragonfly.

The Intel device tested was their absolute lowest end consumer part. The 750 and above drives are completely different beasts, especially at the server level.

loeg• 9 years ago

The 750 series also costs a lot more, while the 600p is comparable in price to Samsung's 960 EVO. The numbers are still interesting :-).

lwlml• 9 years ago

I appreciate that there is so much operating system innovation coming from the *BSD's like the Hammer file systems in DragonFly and security concepts like the new pledge() system call from OpenBSD which informs the operating system that an executing program pledges to never use certain system calls. (i.e. if you say you'll never do something, the operating system will have the privilege of killing your application should there be some kind of buffer overflow/compromise.)

aduitsis• 9 years ago

Re: pledge() in OpenBSD:

In FreeBSD for quite some time there is Capsicum and CloudABI has been included in FreeBSD 11. Definitely worth a look, especially the second which is also present in DragonFly.

https://wiki.freebsd.org/Capsicum

https://nuxi.nl/cloudabi/freebsd/

bujarron• 9 years ago

Strange that there is another dragonfly, a framework for newlisp.

mozumder2• 9 years ago

Been looking for Skylake GPU support for BSD. Does it support Skylake OpenCL?

How compatible is this with FreeBSD? Can I test it alongside a FreeBSD distribution with minimal changes? Does it use the same Ports/Packages system? Do I need to recompile/reinstall all applications? Is there ZFS support?

tiffanyh3• 9 years ago

Yes, Skylake is supported.

See https://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/supportedhardware/

Re: FreeBSD. Dragonfly forked from FreeBSD around 11 years ago (v4.x). So the two have diverged quite a bit of the years. E.g. Different file systems. Different kernel approaches to SMP. Etc.

The package management system is the same though.

cat1992• 9 years ago

to expand -

Shough package systems are based on the same code, syscall/binary level compatibility has diverged, so it does entail a separate installation on another partition/disk/etc and separate set of application packages, etc.

arca_vorago• 9 years ago

Awesome news, and props to the DBSD team for all the consistent hard work they put into it, usually without much fanfare. I'm a pretty hardcore GNU/GPL guy, but I have said before if I were starting an ISP I would probably be doing it with DBSD. The networking stack alone is top-notch, and once HAMMER2 rolls out I honestly expect it to get the momentum to compete with ZFS and BTRFS. (not much traction now though, so as others have said, probably years down the road).

JdeBP3• 9 years ago

Checking the release notes, it does include the recent fix mentioned at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13882171 .

DragonFly BSD 4.8 released

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