[GTALUG] curious... Linux vs BSD ?

Steve Petrie, P.Eng. apetrie at aspetrie.net
Fri Sep 30 04:38:12 EDT 2016


Greetings To GTALUG Talk,

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Christopher Browne via talk" <talk at gtalug.org>
To: <myles at gtalug.org>; "Myles Braithwaite" <me at mylesbraithwaite.com>; 
"GTALUG Talk" <talk at gtalug.org>
Sent: Thursday, September 29, 2016 4:14 PM
Subject: Re: [GTALUG] curious... Linux vs BSD ?

<snip>

> I'm occasionally attracted to take a peek at Dragonfly BSD, as it has
> been trying to do some substantial reimplementations of some of the
> internals with particular view to improving performance and supporting
> clustering.  The HAMMER filesystem is one of the interesting bits;
> some data deduplication capabilities, and a BSD flavour on the
> "advanced" stuff like snapshotting, journalling, et al.

I'm also intrigued by DragonFlyBSD (dfly). Mainly for the same two 
reasons that Chistopher Browne cites: 1. great speed, 2. robust HAMMER 
file system (HAMMER1).

Although my project to use dfly has been on hold due to other 
priorities, I did install dfly on a QEMU / KVM virtual server at 
www.elastichosts.com. Haven't done much with dfly there yet. The plan is 
to use dfly for a website (php, postgresql, nginx).

I am subscribed to the dfly general discussion list. Mostly just 
lurking. Very encouraged to see the dfly team respond well, to calls for 
help with dfly failures, from another list participant who is running an 
app under dfly on a VM. More than one fix to the dfly virtio drivers has 
been delivered. It seems that most dfly servers run on bare metal. But I 
have argued on the dfly list for good dfly support also for QEMU / KVM 
VMs as they are a good entry point for budget-constrained projects based 
on dfly.

There also are a few people trying to use dfly as a desktop o/s. 
However, the main thrust of dfly seems to be in the server arena.

Steve 



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