DragonFly BSD 1.12 Has Landed

Matthew Dillon announced yesterday the release of DragonFly BSD 1.12, a BSD operating system forked from FreeBSD 4 to develop a different approach to concurrency, SMP and other kernel sub-systems. This release is mainly a maintenance update, with a focus on the kernel and userland.

DragonFly BSD 1.12 is the seventh major DragonFly release, and the first one which will no longer support the 386 CPU. Here are some of the kernel changes included in this edition:

• Added the Hardware sensors framework. Ported from OpenBSD via FreeBSD Google SoC port.
• Major work on ipfw2, switch ipfw from ipfw1 to ipfw2.
• ARCnet, FDDI and Token Ring support was removed.
• The fla driver was removed.
• Remove nv driver, it is replaced by nfe.
• Sync the ACPI code with recent changes from FreeBSD.
• Syscall and trap entry code run MPSAFE by default now.
• Fix memory leak in execve()
• Many LWP related issues cleaned up.
• Add support to CAM for 16-byte read and write commands.
• Major update of the CAM code.
• kmalloc() use cases cleaned up.
• Updated rxcsum/txcsum offload support for network drivers.
• mbuf leak fixed. Some use-after-free cases in if_ethersubr.c have been fixed.
• Greatly simplify the vnode_pager*() code.
• The kernel (and virtual kernel) now saves and restores the FP state for signal stack frames. Related libc_r hacks have been removed.
• Ownership check added when dumping core (security fix).
• Fix a possible weakness in the random number generator.
• Fix a weakness in the 'random' IP sequence number generator and turn random IP id's on by default.
• Correct a cpu routing bug in the TCP stack.
• Power management updates.
• Adjust getdirentries to support 64 bit directory position cookies. Also adjust libc. Unconditionally use seek (with its 64 bit offset range).
• Add pselect() syscall.
• Fix an objcache bug, improving objcache performance.

And now, a few of the hardware changes:

• Import msk from FreeBSD which supports the Marvell Yukon II based NICs (both GE and FE).
• Add uticom driver for Texas Instruments TUSB3410 USB to serial chips.
• Add SATA ATAPI support for AHCI controllers.
• Add et which supports Agere ET1310 based Ethernet chips (PCIe only).
• Update the agp code to the latest one from FreeBSD HEAD. This brings in a lot of newer hardware support.
• Add uchcom from NetBSD. A driver for WinChipHead CH341/CH340 chips.
• Add several drivers for sensorsd: coretemp driver for Intel Core on-die digital thermal sensor from FreeBSD and lm and it drivers for hardware sensors used in many motherboards.
• Add experimental bluetooth stack.
• Add many new network adapter IDs.
• Many network drivers updated & improved.
• 802.11 support greatly improved.
• Major sound system update. Added drivers, IDs, and fixes from FreeBSD.
• AGP support greatly improved, changes primarily taken from FreeBSD.

The DragonFly CDs are LiveCDs, but an installer is included, which can be run from the console, or from a web browser. To activate the installer, boot the CD and login with the user 'installer'.

Download DragonFly BSD 1.12 right now from Softpedia!



MORE RELATED ARTICLES: Sony Starts Worrying as the Eee PC Gains Popularity System76 Sells Servers with Ubuntu 7.10 Pre-installed New Nvidia Video Driver Brings GeForce 8 Improvements Wibrain B1L Ultra-Mobile PC Will Use Ubuntu Adobe AIR Is Going to Make Linux Breathe pfSense 1.2 - Improved CARP Input Validation Linux Kernel 2.6.24.3 and 2.6.25 RC3 Launched Grml 1.1 (Skunk) Just Released Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha 5 Available Now Dell Will Ship Ubuntu in Canada and Latin America