Th DragonFly BSD team has released DragonFly BSD 2.2. The biggest improvement in this release is that the HAMMER filesystem is considered production ready, but there is a whole boatload of other improvements as well.
The HAMMER filesystem has several features that put it on par with Sun’s ZFS, such as maximum size of up to one exabyte, infinite snapshots, limited only by retention policy, streaming backups, asynchronous transactional support (no long fscks to check disk state), and much more. You can now also boot from a HAMMER-only disk, but for production systems the developers still recommend a small UFS /boot partition.
Version 2.2 comes in either a bare-bone CD iso, a fully-featured DVD iso with a configured X environment, or a small, 512MB bootable image for use on a USB stick. The release notes detail all the other improvements.
You can get this new release from the mirrors.
I really wish it would be ported to other platforms, because Dragonfly is not my cup of tea.
I know it wouldn’t be easy, but Matt seems to be very supportive.
Yeah, it would be nice if it would become the ZFS or the UFS successor for BSD. Maybe a FUSE version would be a good idea to make it more widely used. Of course, this can’t substitute a native version.
I wouldn’t say that HAMMER would be a good replacement for ZFS (though I haven’t done extensive testing of HAMMER like I have of ZFS), but it is a good file system. here are teh baisc goals of HAMMER
Instant or nearly-instant mount. No fsck needed on crash recovery.
^aEURc Full history retention with easy access, via the live file-system. That means
being able to CD into snapshots of the file-system and being able to access
previous versions of a file (or directory tree), whether they have been
deleted or not.
^aEURc Good performance.
^aEURc Queue-less, incremental mirroring.
^aEURc Ability to re-optimize the layout in the background, on the live file-system.
^aEURc No i-node limitations.
^aEURc Extensible media structures to reduce compatibility issues as time
progresses.
^aEURc Support for very large file-systems (up to 1 exabyte)
^aEURc Data integrity checks, including high-level snapshot tar md5s.
^aEURc Not hamstring a clustered implementation, which has its own list of
requirements.
^aEURc Not hamstring a remote access implementation.
more info here: http://www.dragonflybsd.org/hammer/hammer.pdf
I will do a comparison between ZFS and HAMMER later in the week.
Edited 2009-02-18 16:36 UTC
two good things about HAMMER:
It’s a clearer, simpler design and not as complex, as ZFS.
It doesn’t suck up as much memory, as ZFS.
If you compare how long the development of these two file systems took and how many problems the ZFS port of FreeBSD had I would say it’s the BSD ZFS.
for Firewire/USB/Bluetooth seems promising
I have been looking forward to a stable release of the HAMMER filesystem. I will be trying it out when I get some free time.
Great! I haven’t really had time to play with DragonflyBSD anymore, but I used to use it quite a bit for random odd jobs. Time to upgrade and get involved again.