Rate this project The DragonFly BSD project has announced a new version of their operating system. The new version, DragonFly BSD 5.4.0,includes a number of performance improvements, ships with version 8.0 of the GNU Compiler Collection, and HAMMER2 file system bug fixes. "Big-ticket items: Better support for asymmetric NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) configurations. In particular, both the memory subsystem and the scheduler now understand the Threadripper 2990WX's architecture. The scheduler will prioritize CPU nodes with direct-attached memory and the memory subsystem will normalize memory queues for CPU nodes without direct-attached memory (which improves cache locality on those CPUs). Incremental performance work. DragonFly as a whole is very SMP friendly. The type of performance work we are doing now mostly revolves around improving fairness for shared-vs-exclusive lock clashes, reducing cache ping-ponging due to non-contending SMP locks (i.e. massive use of shared locks on shared resources), and so forth. Major updates to dports brings us to within a week or two of FreeBSD's ports as of this writing, in particular major updates to chromium, and making the whole mess work with gcc-8. DragonFly now ships with GCC 8.0, and runs as the default compiler. It is also now used for building dports." Further information can be found in the release announcement. Download: dfly-x86_64-5.4.0_REL.iso (989MB, MD5, pkglist).
The DragonFly BSD project, which is an independent fork of FreeBSD, has released a new version. The new stable release, DragonFly BSD 5.2.0, includes fixes for Meltdown and Spectre CPU attacks, improvements to the project's HAMMER2 file system and better graphics acceleration. "DragonFly version 5.2 brings Meltdown/Spectre mitigation, significant improvements to HAMMER2, ipfw, and graphics acceleration.... Big-ticket items: Meltdown and Spectre mitigation support; Meltdown isolation and Spectre mitigation support added. Meltdown mitigation is automatically enabled for all Intel CPUs. Spectre mitigation must be enabled manually via sysctl if desired, using sysctls machdep.spectre_mitigation and machdep.meltdown_mitigation. HAMMER2 - H2 has received a very large number of bug fixes and performance improvements. We can now recommend H2 as the default root file system in non-clustered mode. Clustered support is not yet available." More information can be found in the project's release announcement and in the release notes. Download: dfly-x86_64-5.2.0_REL.iso.bz2 (266MB, MD5, pkglist).
The DragonFly BSD project has announced the release of a new version of their operating system. The new version, DragonFly BSD 5.0.0, introduces a number of new features and improvements. In particular, version 5.0.0 features the advanced HAMMER2 file system, updated video drivers and the IPFW firewall has gained improved performance. "Preliminary HAMMER2 support has been released into the wild as-of the 5.0 release. This support is considered experimental and should generally not yet be used for production machines and important data. The boot loader will support both UFS and HAMMER2 /boot. The installer will still use a UFS /boot even for a HAMMER2 installation because the /boot partition is typically very small and HAMMER2, like HAMMER1, does not instantly free space when files are deleted or replaced. DragonFly 5.0 has single-image HAMMER2 support, with live dedup (for cp's), compression, fast recovery, snapshot, and boot support. HAMMER2 does not yet support multi-volume or clustering, though commands for it exist. Please use non-clustered single images for now. IPFW has gone through a number of updates in DragonFly and now offers better performance. pf and ipfw3 are also still supported." Further information can be found in the project's release announcement. Download: dfly-x86_64-5.0.0_REL.iso.bz2 (246MB, MD5, torrent, pkglist).
The DragonFly BSD operating system is a former fork of FreeBSD which is now independently developed. DragonFly BSD is well known for its performance and advanced HAMMER file system. The project's latest release, DragonFly BSD 4.8.0, supports booting on UEFI-enabled computers, improves kernel performance and includes updated Intel video drivers. "The installer can now create an EFI or legacy installation. Numerous adjustments have been made to userland utilities and the kernel to support EFI as a mainstream boot environment. The /boot filesystem may now be placed either in its own GPT slice, or in a DragonFly disklabel inside a GPT slice. DragonFly, by default, creates a GPT slice for all of DragonFly and places a DragonFly disklabel inside it with all the standard DFly partitions, such that the disk names are roughly the same as they would be in a legacy system. The i915 driver has been updated to match the version found with the Linux 4.6 kernel. Broadwell and Skylake processor users will see improvements." Further information can be found in the project's release notes. Download: dfly-x86_64-4.8.0_REL.iso (743MB, MD5, pkglist).
The DragonFly BSD project, a former fork of FreeBSD which is now independently developed, has released a new version: DragonFly BSD 4.6.0. This new release offers a series of incremental updates, including improved accelerated video, better SMP performance and enhanced networking performance under heavy loads. "DragonFly version 4.6 brings more updates to accelerated video for both i915 and Radeon users, home-grown support for NVMe controllers, preliminary EFI support, improvements in SMP and networking performance under heavy load, and a full range of binary packages. The i915 driver has been updated to match the version found with the Linux 4.4 kernel. This gives us significantly better stability on newer CPUs, Broadwell and Skylake in particular. The Radeon driver has been updated to match Linux 3.18, and controls for the backlight are available through drm.radeon.backlight." This release of DragonFly BSD also features over 24,000 third-party ports and introduces EFI support for 64-bit x86 hardware. The release notes offer a complete list of improvements and changes since the previous stable release of DragonFly BSD 4.4. Download: dfly-x86_64-4.6.0_REL.iso.bz2 (232MB, MD5, pkglist).
Justin Sherrill has announced the release of DragonFly BSD, the latest stable release from the BSD-derived operating system that features the Hammer file system, virtual kernels and other unique characteristics. This first point release in the stable 4.4 series is provided due to the late inclusion of an important OpenSSL security update: "DragonFly BSD 4.4 has been tagged and built. DragonFly version 4.4 brings further updates to accelerated video for both i915 and Radeon users, a new locale system, and a new default linker. Significant behind-the-scenes work has also been done, with symbol versioning, Hammer1 improvements, and other changes. Version 4.4.1 was the first release due to the late inclusion of OpenSSL update 1.0.1q. ... If you have an existing 4.2.x system and are running a generic kernel, the normal upgrade process will work. Change your local /usr/src to 4.4." See the brief release announcement and the more detailed release notes for further information. Download the installation CD image from one of the DragonFly BSD mirrors: dfly-x86_64-4.4.1_REL.iso.bz2 (209MB, MD5, pkglist).
The DragonFly BSD team has announced the launch of DragonFly BSD 4.2.0. The new release includes a number of important new features and upgrades. DragonFly BSD 4.2.0 includes GNU's GCC 5 compiler as the default system compiler, offers improved graphics support and Sendmail has been replaced by a home-grown, minimal mail transfer agent. "Sendmail has been replaced by the home-grown DragonFly Mail Agent (DMA) in the base system. DMA is not a full-featured MTA (Mail Transfer Agent), it only accepts mails from local MUA (Mail User Agents) and delivers them immediately, either locally or remotely. DMA doesn't listen to network connections on port 25. People who still need a full-featured MTA must install it from dports. OpenSMTPD, Postfix and Sendmail itself are available as binary packages." DragonFly BSD's audio stack and packet filter have been updated with code ported in from FreeBSD's development branch. More information is available in the release announcement. Download (pkglist): dfly-x86_64-4.2.0_REL.iso.bz2 (205MB, MD5).
Justin Sherrill has announced the release of DragonFly BSD 4.0.1, the first stable 4.0 build of the project's UNIX-like operating system created in 2003 by Matthew Dillon as a fork of FreeBSD 4.8: "Version 4.0.1 released 25 November 2014. 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. As announced during the 3.8 release, DragonFly BSD is 64-bit only. No 32-bit installation images have been generated, and no compatibility work is being done for 32-bit systems. Changes since DragonFly 3.8: new device files /dev/upmap and /dev/kpmap have been added. These memory mappable drivers allow for a per process or common to the kernel shared memory space. The objective is to allow kernel-provided information to be directly read from memory, without having to pay the cost of a traditional system call." Read the detailed release announcement for a full list of changes. Download (MD5, pkglist): dfly-x86_64-4.0.1_REL.iso.bz2 (194MB).