After more than a year of development, the release of DragonFlyBSD 6.0 has been published, an operating system with a hybrid kernel created in 2003 for the purpose of an alternative development of the FreeBSD 4.x branch. Among the features of DragonFly BSD, we can highlight the distributed versioned file system HAMMER, support for loading “virtual” system kernels as user processes, the ability to cache data and FS metadata on SSD drives, context-sensitive variant symbolic links, the ability to freeze processes while saving their state on disk, hybrid kernel using lightweight threads (LWKT).
Major improvements added in DragonFlyBSD 6.0:
- The caching system in the virtual file system (vfs_cache) has been upgraded. The change improved the reliability and performance of file systems. Improved caching of full paths using the cache_fullpath() call.
- The dsynth utility, designed for local assembly and maintenance of DPort binary repositories, has been significantly improved. The new version has the ability to explicitly specify ports-mgmt/pkg for building packages, added support for the ZSTD algorithm, removed obsolete packages in the 'prepare-system' command, and added the ability to use ccache when building.
- Work continued on the HAMMER2 file system, which is notable for such features as separate mounting of snapshots, writable snapshots, directory-level quotas, incremental mirroring, support for various data compression algorithms, multi-master mirroring with data distribution to several hosts. The new release adds initial support for multi-volume partitions, allowing you to combine several local disks into one partition (multi-master network mode is not yet supported). The ability to increase the partition size has been implemented (the hammer2 growfs command has been added). Major deduplication issues have been resolved.
- The performance of the tmpfs file system has been significantly improved. Added mounttmpfs utility to make it easier to place /tmp and /var/run in tmpfs.
- Added an implementation of the Ext2 file system, which does not contain GPL-licensed code.
- Made significant changes to the virtual memory system, including removing support for MAP_VPAGETABLE mmap(), which is required for vkernell (virtual kernels run as a user process) to work. In the next release it is planned to return vkernel, redesigned on the basis of HVM.
- The implementation of callout*() calls has been redesigned.
- Improved EFI framebuffer support.
- Added evdev support to the sysmouse driver.
- Added calls to clock_nanosleep, fexecve, getaddrinfo and timeout. Implemented support for fcntl(F_GETPATH) and the IP_SENDSRCADDR and SO_PASSCRED flags.
- The kmalloc_obj subsystem has been added to the kernel to reduce memory fragmentation.
- Support for the amdsmn driver for the SMN (System Management Network) subsystem of AMD processors has been moved from FreeBSD.
- devd provides automatic recognition of wireless adapters and creation of wlanX network interfaces for them.
- The sysclock_t type has been converted from 32 to 64-bit.
- The system call launch chain has been optimized.
- Optimized work under low memory conditions.
- The Jail isolated environment mechanism has been significantly redesigned. The jail.* sysctl parameters have been restructured.
- Added support for Intel I219 Ethernet controllers and expanded support for Realtek chips. The bnx driver has added support for Broadcom NetXtreme 57764, 57767 and 57787 chips.
- Added support to the network stack for the AF_ARP address family, which represents ARP addresses.
- DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) interface components are synchronized with the Linux kernel 4.10.17. Updated drm/i915 driver for Intel GPU.
- The default serial port bandwidth has been increased from 9600 to 115200 baud.
- The "-f" option has been added to the ifconfig utility and the ability to filter output by interface group.
- Implementations of the utilities shutdown, reboot, printf, test, sh, efivar, uefisign are synchronized from FreeBSD.
- The games ching, gomoku, monop and cgram have been ported from NetBSD.
- The efidp and efibootmgr utilities are included.
- The capabilities of the pthreads library have been expanded, support for pthread_getname_np() has been added.
- The libstdbuf library has been moved from FreeBSD.
- Support for sockaddr_snprintf() has been added to libutil, carried over from NetBSD.
- The passwords specified in the installer allow the use of special characters.
- The basic package includes the zstd package (version 1.4.8).
- Updated versions of third-party components, including dhcpcd 9.4.0, grep 3.4, less 551, libressl 3.2.5, openssh 8.3p1, tcsh 6.22.02, wpa_supplicant 2.9. The default compiler is gcc-8.
Source: opennet.ru