Download DragonFly BSD 6.0

When most people think of a BSD operating system, they think of one of the three variants FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. However, there are several other BSD versions, such as TrueOS and DragonFly BSD. The latter is a fork of FreeBSD 4.8, which came into existence around June 2003. This happened because Matthew Dillon, the project leader of DragonFly BSD, at the time disagree was aware of the chosen development strategy and focus areas of FreeBSD 5. For an overview of DragonFly BSD developments since then, see this page go through. Version 6.0 has been released and the announcement can be found below.

DragonFly BSD 6.0

DragonFly version 6.0 is the next step from the 5.8 release series in 2020. This version has a revamped VFS caching system, various filesystem updates including HAMMER2, and a long list of userland updates. The details of all commits between the 5.8 and 6.0 branches are available in the associated commit messages for 6.0.0rc1 and 6.0.0.

Big ticket items

• Significant work on dsynth, for building packages.
• Many updates of contrib system software.
• HAMMER2 work continues, with updates from Tomohiro Kusumi.
• Major VM work for extent-based representation.
• Due to major changes to the VM system we had to remove the MAP_VPAGETABLE mmap() feature, and this also means that vkernels will not be supported in this release. Support may be re-added at a later time via HVM (but not in this release).