On June 17, 2019, the significant release of the DragonFly BSD operating system was announced \u2013 Release 56. This release brings substantial improvements to the Virtual Memory System, updates for Radeon and TTM, as well as performance enhancements for HAMMER2.<\/p>\n
DragonFly was formed in 2003 as a fork from FreeBSD version 4. Some of the notable features of this operating system include:<\/p>\n
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The high-performance HAMMER2 file system supports writing to multiple snapshots simultaneously, offers a flexible quota system (including on directories), incremental mirroring, compression based on various algorithms, and distributed multi-master mirroring. A clustering mechanism is currently in development.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
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A hybrid kernel based on lightweight threads allowing multiple kernel instances to run as user space processes.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Major changes in the release<\/p>\n
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Numerous changes have been made in the virtual memory subsystem, significantly improving performance by up to 40-70% on specific types of operations.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
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Many changes in the DRM driver for Radeon and the TTM video memory management subsystem for AMD graphics chips.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
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Improved performance of the HAMMER2 file system.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
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Support for FUSE in user space has been added.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
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Implementation of data isolation in CPU between system and user: SMAP (Supervisor Mode Access Prevention) and SMEP (Supervisor Mode Execution Prevention). Support from the CPU is required for these features.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
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For Intel processors, protection against MDS (Microarchitectural Data Sampling) attack class has been implemented. By default, it is disabled and must be manually enabled. Protection against Spectre is enabled by default.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
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The migration to LibreSSL continues.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
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Updated versions of third-party OS components.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n