Out of the BSDs, I would say DragonFly is the most innovative. Its implementation of virtual kernels, HammerFS, thread scheduling via message passing and it has been rock solid as an NFS file server, serving all my local media to other *nix nodes on my LAN. Wikipedia gives a great rundown on the innovations and why Matt decided to fork.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DragonFly_BSD" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DragonFly_BSD</a>
Also worth mentioning, BSDTalk has an interview with Matthew Dillon about the 4.0 release of DragonFly BSD : <a href="http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com/2014/11/bsdtalk248-dragonflybsd-with-matthew.html" rel="nofollow">http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com/2014/11/bsdtalk248-dragonflybsd-...</a>
"The drm/i915 driver is now mostly based on the Linux 3.8.13 implementation and is no longer similar to the FreeBSD driver. Many Linux APIs and data structures have been implemented in the DragonFly kernel in order to reuse as many parts as possible of the Linux drm/i915 code without modifications."<p>I was wondering how did they deal with licensing issue. I thought Linux drivers are all under GPL. And DragonFly is (obviously) under BSD. Then I've noticed gpu/drm/i915 has a permissive (MIT?) license. E.g.:<p><a href="https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_drv.c" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/gpu/dr...</a><p>Is it true for everything else under gpu/drm directory? What license does DRM have?
I'd love to see these 2.5 year old performance benchmarks re-ran.<p><a href="http://www.dragonflybsd.org/performance/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dragonflybsd.org/performance/</a><p>Does anyone know where I can gain the benchmark config/setup so that I can re-run myself?
This is great news, the DragonFly project keeps doing really interesting things. The interview linked elsewhere in the thread give a good overview of how the project is doing. Matthew Dillon mentions in the interview that DragonFly will be able to be much more than an experimental operating system.
This project has intrigued me for a long time. I seriously believe it could eventually become the premiere BSD-flavor OS. Although given all the low-level changes they've made it may not be easy to "label" it BSD in the future.
The first OS to drop 32 bit support, thus eg fixing the year 2038 problem the easy way. Not sure if any others will though, at least not until arm64 is more widespread.
The graphics support sounds neat for (developer) workstation usage, hope it gets at least a basic suspend/hibernate support soon to complete the picture.
What single feature/change caused this to be a major release as opposed to a minor release?<p>In reading the OP link, nothing in particular stood out to me.<p>(Please don't take offense to my statement. The changes are all great. I'm just typically use to major releases to be when something foundational has changed and I'm just not seeing that here)
Wow, nice set of features. It's time I checked Dragonfly BSD again!<p><a href="http://www.dragonflybsd.org/features/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dragonflybsd.org/features/</a>