DragonFly
From Wikinfo
DragonFly is a free operating system for i386 computers. Its mascot is a dragonfly, the insect. DragonFly belongs to the BSD family, and because of that, one who needs a BSD system can use DragonFly. The stable DragonFly 1.8 appeared in January of 2007.
- Website: http://www.dragonflybsd.org/
- Wiki: http://wiki.dragonflybsd.org/
Contents |
Huh? What?
DragonFly is one of those descendants of the Berkeley Software Distribution, a Unix clone. Thus, DragonFly is most useful to those who have some BSD or Unix skills, or who want to run some BSD or Unix software. DragonFly has a reputation within the BSD community, but is mostly unknown elsewhere.
Because DragonFly is free, anyone can make and convey copies of it. The easiest way to obtain it is to download a live CD and boot it on a i386 computer (being any common PC that would run Microsoft Windows). Those who just want to look at their source code can use the online CVSWeb interface. Booting the CD and logging in as root (no password) reaches the Unix command line.
Name and Mascot
Some documents refer to DragonFlyBSD or DragonFly BSD, but the most common name is simply DragonFly. The F is consistently uppercased so that the name DragonFly is in CamelCase.
The mascot of DragonFly is Fred, a red dragonfly, the insect. The photo on DragonFly's site includes the caption, "Fred is one mean looking insect, the go-lucky demon and the fat penguin are TOAST!" This is a reference to the mascots of FreeBSD and Linux. FreeBSD has a nameless red daemon mascot, complete with horns and pitchfork; the logo of FreeBSD is a red sphere with horns. Linux has a fat penguin named Tux.
License
DragonFly is free software. It uses components from other free BSD systems. For new code, the DragonFly project uses the 3-clause version of the BSD license (the BSDL-3), a policy similar to that of FreeBSD.
BSD
Compared to the other variants of the Berkeley Software Distribution, DragonFly is a branch from FreeBSD 4 but with several, ongoing redesigns to the BSD kernel.
Though DragonFly has not yet reached its goal of supporting clusters (so that a single DragonFly system can use processing power, memory and other resources on multiple physical computers), DragonFly is a stable operating system. Its improved support for concurrency and its redesign of the system calls have allowed DragonFly to displace other operating systems, especially FreeBSD and other BSD systems, on servers and other busy computers, in cases where i386 hardware is in use.
There is not yet any port of DragonFly to processor architectures other than i386, so any amd64 systems will run DragonFly in 32-bit mode, while other systems (such as powerpc, alpha or sparc) cannot boot DragonFly. (NetBSD fills the need for portability in the BSD family, with OpenBSD in second place.) However i386 computers are by far the vast majority of hardware. Meanwhile, DragonFly can do things on i386 that other BSD systems cannot do on any hardware:
- Virtual kernels allow DragonFly 1.8 systems to run as processes on other DragonFly systems. (This makes it easier for DragonFly kernel developers to debug their kernels.)
- Multithreading or concurrency is faster and has less bugs. Software running on a DragonFly system is less likely to need to stop and wait for the kernel to do something.
For a better idea, look at the Big-Picture Status.
The text of this wiki page is in the public domain.
