DragonFly 3.0.1 is now available! This release has superior multiprocessor support compared to previous versions. Speed has improved significantly. Big-ticket items: previously the majority of the VM was under a single token, the vm_token, now vm_objects (mappable entities) are each under a private token, concurrent page faults in the same object can proceed, and VM SMP scalability overall is improved; a new time domain multiplexing method has been added to balance storage operation types over long time periods; ACPI + interrupt routing have been upgraded, an SMP kernel will work on all machines and is installed by default; DragonFly now has tcplay(8), a tool for creating and managing encrypted disk volumes.

Recent Related News and Releases

BSD Release: DragonFly BSD 5.8.0 The DragonFly BSD team has published a new release, version 5.8.0 of the server-oriented operating system. The new version makes it easier for users to compile their own repository of binary packages from ports, addresses some glitches in low-memory situations and improves video driver support. " Big-ticket items: dsynth(1) written and added to base, making it more convenient for users to build their own binary repos for DPorts(7). dsynth is used to build some or all of the DPorts collection, over 25000 third-party packages. It's also working as an informal performance measure, with many of the changes in this release to speed up DragonFly when building multiple dependent packages. Many ports these days seem to assume a greater degree of signal safety for libc function, particularly for malloc(). We have implemented a low-overhead signal masking feature that now allows us to make malloc*() and other related functions signal-safe. A ton of bug fixes, stability work, and usability work has gone into this release. Many niggling little annoyances, such as Chrome/Chromium stuttering when system memory is low, have been fixed. DRM (GPU) support continues to improve slowly but steadily. Significantly improved paging algorithms reduces or eliminates UI/browser glitches in low-memory situations. " Further details can be found in the release announcement. Download: dfly-x86_64-5.8.0_REL.iso (728MB, MD5, pkglist).

BSD Release: DragonFly BSD 5.6.0 The DragonFly BSD team has published a new stable version of the project's operating system. The new version, DragonFly BSD 5.6.0, introduces improved video driver support, performance improvements for the HAMMER2 advanced filesystem, and speed improvements for virtual machine environments. " Version 5.6.0 released 17 June 2019. DragonFly version 5.6 brings an improved virtual memory system, updates to radeon and ttm, and performance improvements for HAMMER2. HAMMER2: the filesystem sync code has been rewritten to significantly improve performance; sequential write performance also improved; add simple dependency tracking to prevent directory/file splits during create, rename and remove operations, for better consistency after a crash; re-factor the snapshot code to reduce flush latency and to ensure a consistent snapshot; attempt to pipeline the flush code against the front-end, improving flush versus front-end write concurrency; improve umount operation; fix an allocator race that could lead to corruption; numerous other bugs fixed; improve verbosity of CHECK (CRC error) console messages. " Further details can be found in the release announcement. Download: dfly-x86_64-5.6.0_REL.iso (720MB, MD5, pkglist).

BSD Release: DragonFly BSD 5.4.0 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).

BSD Release: DragonFlyBSD 5.2.0 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).

BSD Release: DragonFly BSD 5.0.0 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).

BSD Release: DragonFly BSD 4.8.1 Justin Sherrill has announced the availability of a new update to the DragonFly BSD operating system. The new release, version 4.8.1, includes a number of kernel performance improvements, better Intel video driver support, and installing in UEFI environments with GPT disk layouts is now supported. " 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 file system 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. (Linux 4.7 in the DragonFly 4.8.1 release.) Broadwell and Skylake processor users will see improvements. " Further information can be found in the project's release announcement. Download: dfly-x86_64-4.8.1_REL.iso.bz2 (245MB, MD5, pkglist).

BSD Release: DragonFly BSD 4.8.0 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).

BSD Release: DragonFly BSD 4.6.0 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).