The DragonFly BSD team has announced the release of DragonFly 6.0, a successor of DragonFly 5.8 released in 2020. DragonFly BSD 6.0 brings a revamped VFS caching system, various filesystem updates including HAMMER2, and a long list of userland updates.

DragonFly BSD 6.0 Preview

Following are the major updates between DragonFly BSD 5.8 and 6.0 releases.

  • A lot of 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).

You may read the official DragonFly 6.0 release notes on the project’s website.