DragonFly belongs to the same class of operating systems as other BSD-derived systems and Linux. It is based on the same UNIX ideals and APIs and shares ancestor code with other BSD operating systems. DragonFly provides an opportunity for the BSD base to grow in an entirely different direction from the one taken in the FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD series.
DragonFly includes many useful features that differentiate it from other operating systems in the same class.
The most prominent one is HAMMER2, a modern high performance filesystem with instant (and mount-writable) snapshots, compression, and de-duplication.
Virtual kernels provide the ability to run a full-blown kernel as a user process for the purpose of managing resources or for accelerated kernel development and debugging.
The kernel uses several synchronization and locking mechanisms for SMP. Much of the work done since the project began has been in this area. A combination of intentional simplification of certain classes of locks to make more expansive subsystems less prone to deadlocks, and the rewriting of nearly all the original codebase using algorithms designed specifically with SMP in mind, has resulted in an extremely stable, high-performance kernel that is capable of efficiently using all cpu, memory, and I/O resources thrown at it.
DragonFlyBSD has virtually no bottlenecks or lock contention in-kernel. Nearly all operations are able to run concurrently on any number of cpus. Over the years, the VFS support infrastructure (namecache, vnode cache), user support infrastructure (uid, gid, process groups, sessions), process and threading infrastructure, storage subsystems, networking, user and kernel memory allocation and management, process fork, exec, and exit/teardown, time keeping, and all other aspects of kernel design have been rewritten with extreme SMP performance as a goal.
| Working state: | Active |
| Desktop: | FVWM |
| Init Software: | RC |
| Package Management: | DPorts |
| Release Model: | Fixed |
| Platforms: | x86_64 |
| Home Page: | www.dragonflybsd.org |
| Developer: | The DragonFly Project |
| This article is part of our Big List of Active Linux Distros which is currently under development. |
What's a Linux distribution ("distro")? |
| A distro provides the user with a desktop environment, preloaded applications, and ways to update and maintain the system. Each distro makes different choices, deciding which open source projects to install and provides custom written programs. They can have different philosophies. Some distros are intended for desktop computers, some for servers without a graphical interface, and others for special uses. Because Linux is an open source operating system, combinations of software vary between Linux distros. |