Software Update: DragonFly BSD 1.0

One of the most beautiful facets of open source is that anyone who disagrees with the course that is being sailed can go in their own direction. The team behind DragonFly BSD took advantage of that opportunity when they broke away from version 4.x of the FreeBSD movement a year ago. In their opinion, FreeBSD 5.x development focuses on the wrong points. The team has set some simple but broad goals that it plans to pursue in the coming years.

Not only will the future be productive, the past year has also paid off, and those fruits are called DragonFly BSD version 1.0. Anyone who thinks they are running into a slightly modified 4.x version of FreeBSD is seriously mistaken. A lot has been done to the guts of the system:

We’ve made remarkable progress in our first year. We have replaced nearly all of the core threading, process, interrupt, and network infrastructure with DragonFly native subsystems. We have our own MP-friendly slab allocator, a Light Weight Kernel Threading (LWKT) system that is separate from the dynamic userland scheduler, a fine-grained system timer abstraction for kernel use, a fully integrated light weight messaging system, and a core IPI (Inter Processor Interrupts) messaging system for inter-processor communications.[break]The team is very satisfied with the progress made. Stability has not been compromised despite the replacement of a lot of important code and the programmers believe that their programming model is clearly superior to that of – among others – FreeBSD 5. In short: a hopeful start for the coming years, because there is also still a lot to do. For a whole load of technical details you can do it diary view the project. In the meantime, everyone is welcome to try the new operating system to download and install. Because let’s face it: “DragonFly” sounds much better than “FreeBSD” doesn’t it?