DragonFlyBSD Project Update - colo upgrade, future trends

[M. L. Wilson]

How time flies, I have been a DragonFly user since about 2013. Certainly
not as long as many of you but I got a very good introduction to *nix
administration from the senior fellows around here and on IRC. DragonFly
is a wonderful OS and has a very dedicated community that has built up
around it. Filesystem, simplicity, innovativeness and the available
packages are my main reasons for sticking with the OS.

I can appreciate the suggested road map, but just wanted to add only one
suggestion. Michael Neumann already suggested it, so I'd like to second
it and provide some additional reasoning why.

HAMMER2 is a graceful filesystem. I trust it more than any other
filesystem that I've used - period. Compression was a must have feature
- its there and works solidly. Live dedup is fast and provides
additional space savings. However, there is constant need to have data
in more than one place for backup or loss prevention situations, and the
current solutions (rsync etc.) are nowhere near as convenient or as well
engineered as HAMMER1's tools.

I think we can all certainly patiently wait for the clustering features
to be developed and integrated, but some kind of HAMMER2 "mirror-copy",
"mirror-stream" or a basic level sync that is consistent across two
nodes (master-slave mirroring?) would be extremely useful. Many who were
initially drawn to DragonFly spoke about the easy filesystem mirroring
features as being THE killer features that made them want to explore the
OS more deeply. Upon discovering the other DragonFly luxuries they
stayed! All of this to say, HAMMER2 fans are pleading for a some low
level filesystem synchronization tools whether network enabled or single
node (disk to disk etc.). With that, I'd certainly be at peace while the
clustering features mature over time.

To all of the developers, thank you for your efforts! You are
appreciated and there are countless more DragonFly users (whether they
realize it or not) out in the world that benefit from your tremendous
contributions to open source!

Michael (AKA kerma)

On 7/28/19 12:27 PM, Michael Neumann wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 22, 2019 at 01:56:07PM -0700, Matthew Dillon wrote:
>> John Marino (marino) pioneered the 'synth' system for dports and continues
>> to help out, but his focus is on RavenPorts for now.  Rimvydas Jasinskas
>> (zrj) and Antonio Huete Jimenez (tuxillo) have done a huge amount of work
>> bringing dports back into operational form and getting the FreeBSD ports
>> sync stuff working better.    DragonFlyBSD is still using synth, and will
>> probably remain on synth for the foreseeable future, though there is always
>> some discussion about how best to move dports forwards.  It's an excellent
>> build platform for us.
> 
> At first, let me thank you and everyone else involved for all the great
> work that went into this project in the recent years! I am happily using
> DragonFly since many years on my main desktop machine and on all my
> servers, just recently had to switch my laptop to Linux because I had to
> run a Windows VM. DragonFly can be a bit rough at times, especially when
> you want to develop Android apps or embedded stuff. Too sad that most
> people just care about Linux and don't write portable software :(
> 
> As Ravenports made very good progress since it's existence and IMHO is
> superior in design, I was hoping that it will become the standard ports
> system for DragonFly one day. Reading your comment above makes me think
> that this won't happen soon or at all :)
> 
>> Francois Tigeot (ftigeot) has done a ton of work taking DRM up to
>> Linux-4.7.10 and this has worked very well for Intel iGPUs.  We are now
>> finally starting to dive into Linux's 'amdgpu' subsystem which is much
>> older, in order to modernize our AMD support (which is still deficient).
>>  Numerous other people have spent a considerable amount of time helping
>> test GPU support and tracking down bugs.  The work is ongoing.
> 
> Does that mean that there is a plan to support the embedded GPU of Zen2?
> 
>> I apologize for only writing everyone's names in plain ascii :-)
> 
> My name appeared three times in the list below, and I wasn't even
> drinking :)
> 
>> Right now HAMMER2 makes for an excellent single-device filesystem
>> (extremely well given that it supports writable snapshots and compression
>> out of the box), but it remains deficient when it comes to expandable
>> storage, multiple devices, and clustering.  This will be active work for me
>> but honestly the amdgpu support has to come first so it's still going to be
>> a long-haul for HAMMER2.
> 
> One thing I was really hoping for is a HAMMER2 equivalence to "hammer
> mirror-copy", or "zfs send/receive". My server is still on HAMMER1 and I
> really enjoy being able to continuously back it up. That's the only
> thing I am missing in HAMMER2.
> 
> There are four more things on my DragonFly wishlist:
> 
> - Working Bluetooth stack (so I can use my headset)
> 
> - USB Webcam support (V4L)
> 
> - Hardware virtualization ("bhyve", to run Windows :)
> 
> - RISC-V port :D
> 
> Best regards,
> 
>   Michael
>