The DragonFly BSD operating system is a new system originally based on FreeBSD
that strives to take kernel development in a different, more modern direction.
They focus on re-implementing internal API's and simplifying kernel code. to
improve performance and scalability.  One of their hallmarks is the use of
message-based API's in different kernel subsystems; this work is reminiscent
of the Plan 9 model.

More information may on it can be found at:

http://www.dragonflybsd.org/

8 responses total.

I'm tempted to try DragonFly BSD.  Does anyone here use it?

Sounds kinda "fishy" to me. ;)

I recently gave DragonFly BSD a whirl.  I bought an HP "netbook" at 
the PX here in Afghanistan to hack around with; it's the perfect size 
to put into my assault pack when I go on missions, has good battery 
life, and I can play with it when I've got some down time.  I wanted 
to have an environment where I could hack around and read books/papers 
as PDFs and PostScript, or HTML.  Specific requirements included 
Emacs, the JVM, a solid Lisp environment, support for suspend/resume, 
X, and the network.

Getting the computer was easy enough, though I had to buy a USB DVD 
drive with it so I would have some way to load the operating system 
from media.  I have no *real* network access here (I can download 
something to the office computer and burn it to a CD, but plugging a 
non-government computer into a military network is a serious no-no).

Anyway, I downloaded the latest version of DragonFly and tried it 
out.  It installed, and looked pretty nice; HAMMER seemed like it 
could be cool (though a friend of mine tells me he doesn't trust Matt 
Dillon's intuition when it comes to implementation).  The WiFi didn't 
work, which was disappointing.  Kerberos had been removed from the 
base system, which was again disappointing.  But the biggest 
disappointment was that most of the 3rd party stuff I was interested 
in using didn't support DragonFly: there was no SBCL, no Oberon, many 
other languages and applications were missing.  It was kind of sad, 
really....

I finally ended up installing the latest release of FreeBSD, which 
pretty much solved the hardware support issues, and for which I could 
get pretty much all the software I was interested in.  It's a shame; 
DragonFly seemed lighter-weight than the others, has some interesting 
ideas in it, and seems like it could be really cool.  But lack of 
application and hardware support is definitely keeping it back.

  
how new/old is the dragonlfy os? was it a beta with development ongoing?
  

It's been around since 2003.  Stable releases have been fairly 
frequent; but it's the least well known of the BSD distributions.

More history is available here: http://www.dragonflybsd.org/history/

Ignoring the no-no factor, I would be surprised if you could plug a
rogue  device into a MILNET network; I thought 802.1x or MAC
white-listing were  manditory, even on NIPRNET.  -DTK 

I don't think so, but even so: it's easy to reassign a MAC address.

IEEE 802.1x is nice because it forces the edge device to authenticate,
and  can be setup to use a certificate for authentication, which canbe
issued by  a CA. This provides a high levelof assurance that the device
is a  trusted/vetted device or that the operator of the device was able
to steal a  client cert and impersonate that client effectively. Cisco's
ISE product  helps to automate the dot1x management, and there are
several nice CA  products, including one that comes with Windows 2008
and RedHat's Dogtag CA.   -DTK 

Response not possible - You must register and login before posting.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss