| [Forum] Matt Dillon's Dragonfly pre-release | ANN.lu |
| Posted on 02-Jul-2004 09:17 GMT by Elwood | 10 comments
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Some of you probably remember Matt Dillon. He released DragonFly, an operating system and environment designed to be the logical continuation of the FreeBSD-4.x OS series.
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| Comment 1 | Anonymous | | 02-Jul-2004 09:35 GMT |
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| Matt Dillon's Dragonfly pre-release : Comment 2 of 10 | ANN.lu |
| Posted by Joe "Floid" Kanowitz on 02-Jul-2004 12:56 GMT | In reply to Comment 1 (Anonymous):
Will there be a PPC version?
Probably not for a bit. I shudder to go into all the reasons right now (just waking up), but let's say that the project is about 'not being stupid' on x86, first. Once's that's done, and the kernel architecture has been shaken down by real-world use, the time may come time to investigate how portable it could be... not unlike what happened to Linux, but to DBSD's advantage, its developers already have the awareness that things like endianness would then be an issue. ;)
Since G5s are arguably very 'x86-like' now (in the sense that both architectures have become postmodern, superscalar, out-of-order chips with 'large' on-die caches), and are coming mostly as SMP systems (with *roughly* similar issues overall, though not yet the NUMA DBSD might be targeting), I'm going to take a wild guess and say someone, somewhere will try to tackle it around 2.0.
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If you're an experienced BSD user, or perhaps an experienced Debian user looking to try something new, 1.0 should be a lot of fun... Where 'experienced' means 'can survive at the command line long enough to set XFree86 up,' and 'fun' implies helping to uncover (and surviving through) any growing pains not caught in the Release Candidate.
If you're more comfortable with something like Mandrake or OS X, but have absorbed the enthusiasm and want to feel the snazziness at work on your x86, you might want to wait for Silver, which will be the first commercial DragonFly distro. [I have to admit, I have some doubts there... if only because, if coming soon, it'll be a 1.0 of a distribution of a 1.0 of an OS. But if it funds and motivates development of some of the missing miracles -- the packaging system, for instance, is not quite nailed down -- then it'll have done a service. Why yes, those are a lot of ifs.]
(Dreams for the packaging system here, if you'd like to know why it's been twice-patched FreeBSD Ports in the near term, and why it looks like Debian APT in the... medium-term. APT might even prove 'good enough' for the long haul, if people are still seriously considering it.)
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Disclaimer: I'm still lacking the hardware (or at least, the disk space) to actually run the tree myself. Opinions are formulated based on what I've caught of dragonfly-kernel, and more recently, only what's filtered down to the DBSD blawg. It is, however, clear that this release (or as happened, the release of the Release Candidate) was timed for USENIX, where it's long-standing tradition to 'come bearing gifts.'* So, while it should, of course, be quite nice as it is (and probably has a 'better' first Release Candidate than some recent OSes have had -RELEASEs), remember also that grain of salt.
*As it's put normally, "have something to present." If you want to be crass, you could say the USENIX cycle may be the reason anyone dare claimed "release" status on FreeBSD 5. But as such, it's also what keeps these guys from holing up in their ivory towers and forces them to toss their work out for review. You could say the whole thing is a 'stability test' of how well an architecture holds up to deadline pressure, a very real-world scenario. [This is said as a FreeBSD user; however bumpy the ride, other OSes would've tried even more of my patience, and it sure has been.. educational.]
floid@mustelid:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/MUSTELID i386, FreeBSD mustelid 5.2.1-RC2 FreeBSD 5.2.1-RC2 #1: Fri Feb 20 12:13:38 EST 2004, 10:48AM up 123 days, 6:37, 39 users, load averages: 0.51, 0.41, 0.41 signing off. |
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