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by loeg 2732 days ago
Yeah, Dillon (lead developer) forked FreeBSD 4 over (at least) a dispute in how SMP should be implemented. (FreeBSD 5 was the first release to support SMP.) DragonFlyBSD => DFBSD => Dillon's FreeBSD.
2 comments

I recall back then Dillon had some unconventional ideas how to do SMP compared to the traditional approach of ever more fine-grained locking as done by FreeBSD and Linux. Is DragonFlyBSD still following this design, and if so, how well did it work out, or if not, did they revert to a more traditional approach?
I don't follow DFBSD development too closely, but it looks like they still have the somewhat novel lock tokens:

https://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/developer/Locking_and_Sync...

I don't know how well it works for them or if they've gone back to using more typical locking more recently.

FreeBSD 3 supported SMP. FreeBSD 5 had the "new" SMP.
Mea culpa. This all predates my involvement.