The new DragonFly BSD 6.4 fixes many important bugs. Many changes concern the cluster-optimized HAMMER2 file system, which plays the same role for DragonFly BSD as ZFS does for FreeBSD. These include, for example, a memory leak and bugs in the clean-up function (bulkfree), which among other things removes dead files. Some of the syntax has also been made clearer, which could lead to problems in existing scripts.
On the networking side, bugs have been fixed in the FreeBSD ipfw firewall and in the packet filter pf, an old version of OpenBSD’s pf. There were a surprising number of fixes for the libc and DSynth libraries. With the latter, all ports can be compiled into a binary repository in one go. As with FreeBSD, all software that is not part of the base system is located in the ports. DragonFly BSD 6.4 is still based on the outdated GCC 8.1 and there are no plans to switch to the modern Clang/LLVM in the near future. There were no changes to the type 2 hypervisor NVMM ported from NetBSD – up to 128 VMs per host, each with 128 vCPUs and 127 TB RAM – in the new version.
In the kernel, some problems with the name cache have been solved. Also fixed a security hole in the kernel that allowed a local attack.
DragonFly BSD was forked from FreeBSD 4.8 by Matt Dillon in 2003 in order to create a BSD specifically for server and cluster operations with its kernel thread and SMP optimizations. It is under the free BSD license and is only available for the x86-64 platform. All changes are documented in detail in the changelog. Live images (USB and ISO) and an uncompressed ISO image for installation at VPS providers are freely on the project page available.
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