DragonFly BSD 2.6: towards a free clustering operating system

DragonFly has been a favorite of mine for a while now. It is easily the most ambitious of the BSDs, without being so far ahead of the pack as Plan 9 (i.e. it's still usable).<p>However, this article is from 2010 and DragonFly recently released v3.0.2. They've also added significantly more features in the direction of a clustering OS. You could probably get more (and more up to date) information just from reading their "Features" page: <a href="http://www.dragonflybsd.org/features/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dragonflybsd.org/features/</a>

<i>"The ultimate goal of DragonFly BSD is to allow programs to run across multiple machines as if they are running on one system."</i><p>Isn't this OpenMosix? <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMosix" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMosix</a> <a href="http://linuxpmi.org/trac/" rel="nofollow">http://linuxpmi.org/trac/</a><p>The two features I miss about openMosix were the distributed filesystem and process freezing. As nodes were auto-discovered, they would be populated in a global filesystem, so you could access the root filesystem of any node from a central tree. In addition there was a tool that would 'freeze' the state of a running process and any files that were open and save it all to a file, so you could 'thaw' it at any time and resume where it left off. This worked well if you only used i/o with the distributed filesystem, so you could thaw it into any system and it would just work. I guess this is an ok alternative: <a href="http://cryopid.berlios.de/" rel="nofollow">http://cryopid.berlios.de/</a>

I would love to know how stable Dragonfly is and how its hardware support is. I have read that they regularly pull changes from FreeBSD. So I expect it to be almost on par with FreeBSD. But since they have significantly modified the FreeBSD kernel and they use NetBSD packages, I can understand if they lag behind given their limited resources. Ironically, I am running Linux on my laptop and I am using FreeBSD on my netboot, which I may replace with DragonFly.

I would love to know how stable Dragonfly is and how its hardware support is. I have read that they regularly pull changes from FreeBSD. So I expect it to be almost on par with FreeBSD. But since they have significantly modified the kernel and they use NetBSD packages, I can understand if they lag behind given their limited resources. Ironically, I am running Linux on my laptop and I am using FreeBSD on my netboot, which I may replace with DragonFly.

I think its the only BSD that uses git for its SCM :)