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by 0x457 1263 days ago
Dragonfly BSD is very good at being bad at taking constructive feedback /s

It was born out of disagreement about how SMP should work in FreeBSD around Northwood P4 era (first HyperThreaded consumer CPU). Around that time, every general purpose OS as absolutely horrible at utilizing more than one logical cores.

FreeBSD first gained SMP support at 5.0, and it was actually usable at 5.2. DragonFly BSD author had a disagreement how to implement it and though 5.x direction is bad, so, IIRC, he forked 4.x line and implemented his own vision from there. Then it was "FreeBSD does it, so I'm going to do it differently", at least that's how it looks from an outside perspective.

So, it's good at SMP if we're going by that outdated classification of BSD systems.
1 comments
alberth 1263 days ago
A lot of people would consider FreeBSD 5.x a horrible release (especially given how rock solid 4.x was), and things not stabilizing again until 8.x (many years later).

Some would argue that in hindsight, Matt was correct at the time for the fork - from a technical standpoint.

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Beltalowda 1263 days ago
I remember explaining why I used FreeBSD instead of Linux back in the day, and just after I said "it's a bit more stable than Linux" the system completely froze. Ouch, embarrassing. Needless to say, no one was especially convinced. That was on 5.0 or 5.1 IIRC.

(These days, there isn't too much of a difference any more; Linux has come a long way in the last 20 years.)

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0x457 1259 days ago
My whole journey to freebsd started because I had a very old PC that I used as PPTP server while running not-so-legal ISP in the neighborhood. FreeBSD happened to be the greatest for this because of in-kernel support thanks to netgraph, but the real reason why - Linux couldn't finish the installation on that machine without crashing. FreeBSD meanwhile kept working until I made enough money to buy a better hardware.

Just for that reason, I will forever love it, but won't be using it on desktop - I can't use 10 years for GPU drivers on my main rig.

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0x457 1263 days ago
Oh, I know. I suffered the entire way to 8.0. Until 5.2 it was completely unusable. I also remember unplugging or plugging USB device would often lead to kernel panic until 9.0 IIRC.

I agree that he was correct at the time. Likewise, I do wish that split never happened, though.

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alberth 1263 days ago
> * I do wish that split never happened*

I too wish the split hadn’t happened, and for Matt’s ideas to have landed in FreeBSD.

Dragonfly today is remarkable, still competing head to head with FreeBSD 15 years later but with a development team literally 1/50th the size.

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loeg 1263 days ago
FreeBSD doesn’t have 50 active core developers so it’s hard to imagine how Dragonfly could be 1/50th the size.
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alberth 1263 days ago
FreeBSD (402)

https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/contributors/#staff-com...

vs.

DragonflyBSD (67)

https://www.dragonflybsd.org/team/

So, correct. Not 1/50th.

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loeg 1263 days ago
The majority of names on the FreeBSD list are relatively inactive.
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