DragonFly BSD - First Impressions

Written 2018-02-19 by Len Payne in Learning

As part of SLLUG, we have monthly chats about open source software. One of the places I’ve had a significant blind spot in my FLOSS knowledge is with the BSD ecosystem. Our March conversation is about enterprise technologies. I tasked our members with some homework: go learn something new, and tell us about it!

So I’m diving in a very specific direction: I’m going to learn about DragonFly BSD.

History Lesson

Unix history-simple.svg

I was introduced to DragonFly BSD through Lobsters some time ago. For those (like me) unfamiliar with the BSD world, I want to get into a brief history lesson before I get more specifically into DragonFly BSD.

What is DragonFly BSD?

In 2003, one of the core FreeBSD developers, Matthew Dillon, disagreed fundamentally with the direction that FreeBSD was taking with the rise of threading and symmetric multiprocessing (SMP). He tried to bring change within the FreeBSD project, but the disagreement was fundamental enough that Matthew decided to fork the FreeBSD project and begin a new BSD system of his own.

It’s now been 15 years, so the key features that differentiate DragonFly BSD from other operating systems are:

Over time, though, DragonFly BSD has worked tightly with the other BSD systems to move forward together. So good changes that make sense to port into DragonFly BSD from FreeBSD, NetBSD or OpenBSD do get incorporated into DragonFly BSD.

DragonFly BSD’s Use Cases

DragonFly BSD is a fully-featured OS, and can operate in either traditional server or desktop roles. Its major feature development, though, is primarily focused on bare-metal installs. Where much of the world is pushing to the cloud, this DragonFly seems content to fly closer to the ground.

As a test, I installed a basic web stack on my DragonFly BSD VM: Nginx, PHP, and PostgreSQL.

It was pretty straightforward. The usage of rc.conf brought me back to fond old days of using Gentoo and Arch Linux (before systemd).

One Challenge - vim without X11

There is one thing I wish had been more clear early on. I wanted to install vim but it had massive X11 dependencies, and I wasn’t planning on running graphical.

So the suggestions I found had me installing from dports (the DragonFly BSD version of ports). But no one mentioned vim-lite as an option.

So here it is: if you want vim without the X11 dependencies on FreeBSD or DragonFly BSD, install vim-lite. It appears on the FreeBSD side this has been renamed as vim-console as of Jan 11th, 2018, and I expect that change to rollover to DragonFly BSD sooner or later.

This little excursion helped me better understand the relationship between FreeBSD and DragonFly BSD, though. Most common software available for FreeBSD will be already available for DragonFly BSD as they share a lot of things on the ports side. Much of it was even built-in, so a lot of suggestions/fixes for FreeBSD worked just great on the DragonFly BSD side.

First Impressions

I’m happy with my decision to explore. For the time being, I’m going to use this server to experiment and play around with. It was really easy to install the base software for my web stack. And rvm actually installed seamlessly.

There are significant limitations with DragonFly BSD. It’s only available on x64 hardware. It has a small developer base (smaller than FreeBSD even.) The driver availability is thus reduced due to the small dev base.

However, it’s a lean, focused machine that gets the job done.

I don’t know if I’ll be pushing production workloads onto DragonFly BSD, but I think my next physical server will be running this on the bare metal, and that’s pretty cool.

I’m looking forward to using DragonFly to learn how to use jails, and learning to segment servers the BSD-way. So perhaps that will be my next post.

Notes:
  1. The Simple Unix History Diagram is by Eraserhead1, Infinity0, Sav_vas [CC BY-SA 3.0 or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons