HAMMER2 support is still considered experimental

Oct 16, 2017 17:12 GMT  ·  By

More than six months after the release of the 4.8 series, the BSD-derived DragonFly BSD operating system has been updated today to version 5.0, a major new stable series that introduces new features and numerous improvements.

Probably the biggest new feature of the DragonFly BSD 5.0 release is the introduction of a bootable variant of the next-generation HAMMER2 file system developed specifically for the operating system. Users can finally install DragonFly BSD on a HAMMER2 file system, though it is considered experimental at the moment.

"Preliminary HAMMER2 support has been released into the wild as-of the 5.0 release. This support is considered EXPERIMENTAL and should generally not yet be used for production machines and important data," said the devs. "The boot loader will support both UFS and HAMMER2 /boot."

When installing DragonFly BSD 5.0 on a HAMMER2 formatted disk drive, the installer will use a UFS formatted /boot partition because, by design, the file system doesn't immediately free space when deleting or replacing files on the local disk. Also worth mentioning, this release comes with single-image HAMMER2 support.

Better GPU support, IPFW updates

Among other noteworthy changes that landed in the major DragonFly BSD 5.0, we can mention GPU improvements supporting Intel graphics cards up to the 7th generation Kaby Lake chips, support for Intel GPUs on systems with hybrid graphics, as well as support for dual Intel and Nvidia or Intel and AMD Radeon MacBook computers.

While still supporting ipfw3 and pf, DragonFly BSD 5.0 comes with an up-to-date IPFW stateful firewall that offers better performance. Support for more than 900,000 processes on a single machine is also possible with this release, which introduces the efisetup(8) utility for creating complete UEFI installs of DragonFly BSD on a fresh disk drive.

Support for AMD Ryzen processor is available as well, and you can study the full changelog below if you're curious to know what exactly was changed in this release. DragonFly BSD 5.0 is available for download right now from our website, but you can also upgrade from version 4.8.x by using the instructions provided by the developers in the release notes.

DragonFly BSD 5.0 Changelog