[todd8]

First two paragraphs of History section found on DragonFly web site[1]:

> A technical introduction: The ultimate goal of the DragonFly project at its inception was to provide native clustering support in the kernel. This type of functionality requires a sophisticated cache management framework for filesystem namespaces, file spaces and VM spaces. These and other features eventually culminate in the ability to allow heavily interactive programs to run across multiple machines with cache coherency fully guaranteed in all respects. This also requires being able to divide resources, including the CPU by way of a controlled VM context, for safe assignment to potentially unsecured third-party clusters over the internet. This original design direction, although no longer the primary goal of the DragonFly project, has influenced many of the design decisions made in the intervening years. While full cache coherency is no longer a top level goal, filesystem coherency is, and that direction continues to guide the project in a number of ways.

> DragonFly BSD was forked from FreeBSD 4.8 in June of 2003, by Matthew Dillon. The project was originally billed as "the logical continuation of the FreeBSD 4.x series", as quoted in the announcement, but this description has long since become obsolete. From a performance perspective DragonFly's only real competitor these days is Linux.

[1] https://www.dragonflybsd.org/history/

[amalgamated_inc]

Yea, I checked the about section of the website a bit and honestly didn't get it :) Not familiar with most of the terms.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

Roughly the original idea was similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_system_image That is, make a cluster of machines look like a single BSD instance, by allowing virtual memory to span multiple machines, processes to move, etc, all while preserving cache coherency.

Obviously this is an insanely difficult goal, which is why DragonFly didn't make it particularly far towards it. Additionally we've seen the rise of virtualization and systems like k8s for managing clusters, which would reduce interest from potential collaborators.