DragonFly BSD is an open source BSD operating system designed to be the logical continuation of the FreeBSD-4.x OS series. It is very similar to other BSD-based distributions, such as FreeBSD, NetBSD or OpenBSD. It is a fork in the path, so to speak, giving the BSD base an opportunity to grow in an entirely new direction from the one taken in the FreeBSD-5 series. On top of that, it includes an unique set of features that differentiate it from other similar OSes.
HAMMER is the main attraction
HAMMER is DragonFly’s main attraction, a modern, high performance filesystem that features historic access functionality and built-in mirroring. The kernel is also one of the reasons why DragonFly is a better BSD distribution.
Offers two different schedulers for the kernel
DragonFly’s kernel includes two different schedulers, one that schedules all executable entities (Light Weight Kernel Thread) and another one that selects a single user thread at a time for each processor and abstracts out user threads (User Thread Scheduler). Additionally, the kernel features a complex kernel memory allocator comprised of an object-oriented memory allocator and a basic kernel malloc called kmalloc(), the DragonFly device filesystem (DEVFS), a virtual kernel (VKERNEL), NFS V3 RPC asynchronization, and a disk I/O scheduler framework (dsched).
Features, lots of features
Among other interesting features, we can mention the NULL Filesystem Layer (NULLFS ) that supports non-looping arbitrary mount points, TMPFS (Temporary Filesystem VFS), transparent disk encryption, managed SSD (Solid Storage Device) support, variant (context-sensitive) symlinks, DNTPD (DragonFly Network Time Daemon) and DMA (DragonFly Mail Agent). In addition, users will be able to checkpoint or suspend processes to disk at any time. The distro provides strong AHCI drivers, stable device names, as well as well grounded encryption and volume management.
Bottom line
Overall, DragonFly proves to be a modern, user-friendly and very accessible UNIX-like operating system. It can be used on a daily basis as a desktop system or as a powerful BSD server.
