DragonFly BSD 3.0 improves multiprocessor support

Developer Justin Sherrill has announced the release of version 3.0 of DragonFly BSD, a FreeBSD fork. The major update, labelled 3.0.1, reportedly performs "significantly better" on multicore systems than previous releases.

Major work has been done on VM SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) in DragonFly BSD 3.0 to improve overall scalability, providing, for example, "excellent" results for PostgresSQL and MySQL. The SMP kernel is now also installed by default; using SMP, the kernel can run two or more processes concurrently. The HAMMER filesystem used by the distribution has been updated to work better on systems with as little as 256 MB of RAM and its performance has been "greatly increased" thanks to a new time domain multiplexing method. A new tool for creating and managing encrypted disk volumes, tcplay(8), has been added.

Sherrill says that DragonFlyBSD 3.0 "took longer than normal because of a crazy bug hunt, but the payoff is that this version performs better than ever". However, following initial reports of problems with the x86_64 GUI images, the developer has confirmed that there is an issue and says that another version is currently being built with a patch that should fix it.

More details about the new version, including a full list of changes, can be found in the release notes. DragonFly BSD 3.0.1 is available for 32- and 64-bit systems from the project's mirrors; at the time of writing, the project's download page still shows 2.10.1 as the current stable release. DragonFly BSD is licensed under the DragonFly BSD Licence.

See also:

• FreeBSD 9.0 released, a report from The H.
• PC-BSD 9.0 released, a report from The H.

(crve)