[cgag]

Their filesystem is interesting but what I find impressive is they're at like a linux level of performance despite having a team of like 10 people because of the way they approached concurrency. I believe they spawned out of dillon disagreeing with freebsd's approach, and it's beautiful to me that they're competitive with linux despite not having a huge team of people polishing it.

I also want to say that Matthew Dillon is brilliant and a wonderful person. I played with dragonflybsd on my laptop for a while and hung out in the IRC, and he was always around and willing to help. I found a couple legitimate bugs and he had non-trivial patches up for me in like an hour.

Their networking stuff is very cool too, I can't really remember the details once, but I remember seeing an article about high performance networking that explained why you wanted to avoid the linux kernel so that you could do x,y and z yourself, and dillon explained that dragonfly kernel just does all that stuff itself.

I wish it got more use because there's so much potential there, but it's quite a chicken and the egg problem, and honestly I feel like the BSDs are kind of doomed unless they add apis that support linux containers.

[hestefisk]

IIRC, Matt forked FreeBSD from v4 as he disagreed with the approach taken to SMP (ie multi processor support) in v5. He forked v4 and wrote his own patch set to deliver SMP support. That is a long time ago. I haven’t run Hammer / Hammer2 so cannot comment on why it is awesome. To me my file system needs to be properly battle tested and trusting my precious personal data to a one man band feels a bit too esoteric.

I have always wondered how Matt makes a living from this given the somewhat niche positioning of Dragonfly?

[zandl]

I think after Best Internet exited he likely did quite well, it’s possible he’s just doing DragonFly as a full time hobby. But I have no idea.