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DragonFly BSD

Operating Systems
DragonFly BSD

DragonFly BSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system forked from FreeBSD 4.8 in 2003 by Matthew Dillon. It deliberately takes a different technical path from the other BSDs, focusing on scalability across many CPU cores, a hybrid kernel design, and the innovative HAMMER2 copy-on-write filesystem.

Key Features

  • HAMMER2 filesystem — a copy-on-write filesystem with snapshots, history and very fast crash recovery
  • Hybrid kernel tuned for SMP — lightweight kernel threads, per-CPU caches and message-passing internals that scale across cores
  • Virtual kernels (vkernel) — boot a full DragonFly kernel as a userspace process for development and testing
  • Swapcache and tmpfs — memory-efficient caching and in-memory filesystems
  • dports / pkg — a large binary package set derived from FreeBSD ports
  • Live USB and DVD images — try the system before installing
  • Bidirectional userland variants — variant symlinks and a clean build system

Why Use DragonFly BSD?

DragonFly is for users who want a BSD built for modern multi-core hardware with a filesystem that is genuinely different. HAMMER2 gives robust snapshots and recovery, while the vkernel and hybrid design make it a strong platform for operating-system experimentation.

Use Cases

  • Storage servers built on HAMMER2
  • Kernel and filesystem research
  • BSD enthusiasts wanting a current desktop or server
  • Teaching concurrency and OS internals

Platform

x86-64 (amd64). Earlier i386 support has been retired.

Licence

Free and open source. DragonFly BSD is released under the BSD 3-clause licence and compatible OSI-approved licences. Latest stable release: 6.4.2.

Website

dragonflybsd.org

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