Just under eight months after 5.2, version 5.4 has now been released by DragonFly BSD. In version 5.4 of the free, originally from FreeBSD 4 derived operating system numerous improvements and extensions were made. One of them is the improved support for asymmetric NUMA systems. This concerns systems where the processors can not access all of the memory directly, which is apparently implemented in the AMD Threadripper 2990WX. In DragonFly BSD 5.4, the scheduler has been adapted to preferentially place processes on CPUs that have direct access to memory, and memory management normalizes the memory queues for CPU nodes without directly attached memory.
The speed of the kernel has been optimized by trying to reduce lock conflicts and make better use of the cache. The Hammer2 file system has been debugged and is recommended as the root file system, except in cluster mode, which is not yet supported. DragonFly BSD now also has virtio drivers to run in virtual machines with significantly better performance. Many other drivers have been added or added. The DRM code has been updated to Linux 4.7. The Radeon graphics driver, however, is only on the state of Linux 3.18.
The system is now shipped with GCC 8, which is also used to compile additional software from the dports tree. dports is the Dragonfly variant of the FreeBSD ports tree and is up to date with FreeBSD. The older compiler versions GCC 4.7.4 and GCC 5.4.1 will be installed additionally. Both should not be used if possible.
The initial Ramdisk now provides a complete emergency rescue system. All other changes can be read in detail in the notes to the publication.
DragonFly BSD 5.4 can be downloaded as a USB and ISO image for 64-bit x86 computers from numerous mirror servers. The image is at the same time a live image and installation system. Users can thus boot directly from the supplied medium an executable system with which the compatibility of the hardware can be tested. The images contain only the basic system. Additional applications for DragonFly BSD can be installed via the dports system.
Source: https://www.pro-linux.de/news/1/26565/dragonfly-bsd-54-freigegeben.html
Submitted by: Arnfried Walbrecht
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