Jesse Wattenbarger wrote in with his success story of switching to DragonFly, both for server and desktop. Of note is his noticeable speedup with swapcache.
10 Replies to “DragonFly server and desktop”
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A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
I’d love to switch to DragonFly on my desktop, but it can’t be done. My desktop is a laptop (ThinkPad T410i).
No wireless internet.
No suspend to ram.
No hibernate to disk.
No Linux emulation.
NetBSD is closest to what I want from the BSDs.
I’m skeptical on the “no wireless” claim. Nobody has really been interested in having Linux emulation on x86-64, and any interest that was there is waning.
Isn’t suspend/hybernate the same topic? I guess you mean “sleep” & hibernate in windows terms. No, DF doesn’t do those, it’s true, and nobody is working on them.
ThinkPad T410i; you would have better support out of the box on a T400 or a T420. Choosing the right hardware is half of the battle.
No wireless Internet; again, choosing the right hardware is half the battle.
No suspend to ram; I’d be surprised if even NetBSD or FreeBSD reliably suspended and resumed from RAM on a Thinkpad T410i.
No hibernate to disk. Do any of the BSD’s do this at present?
No Linux emulation. Linux runs fine in a VM. If you really need virtualization, then yes you might need to check out the oher BSD’s.
I wonder why there are so many whining guys about “this or that prevented them to have DF BSD (here) installed on their rigs” as the facts said they had tried to push the BSD through “old junk” bowels? Pathetic. Most of the cons are platitudes and tripe.
I’d like to read how __good__ DFs were on the __latest__ rigs with the __newest__ Intel and AMD CPUs/APUs. Who’s first?
Regards
Well, the desktop/server computer I’m running might not be the _newest_, but it’s an IvyBridge core i5 overclocked with 16GB of fast RAM. Xorg runs great with the accelerated intel driver. And, many DF users have great success with Haswell, and increasing success with Broadwell.
Thank you. Intel seems to be served by drivers more than good. :)
But what about the AMD world of such “exotic” CPUs as “embedded” APU C70 Ontario (e.g. ASRock C70M1) and AMD Kabini A4-5000 (ASRock QC5000-ITX/PH SFT1), Kaveri (FM2+), other Kabini (socket AM1), newest Athlon II XXX (FM2), FX beasts (AD3+) and Opteron 12-16 core kings (G34, e.g. from eBay)?
One can put together PCs from cheapest pets to the sky high expensive ones! With CPUs and/or GPUs. Possibilities are zillions. HDD, SSD, NVMe, USB 3.1 etc.
What about examples about such boxes as routers/firewalls, NAS and Desktop PCs? Did anybody build such boxes? What about pros and cons? I beg for examples! :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socket_AM1
http://www.tomshardware.com/t/amd/
I can find them concerning OpenBSD (routers, firewalls), FreeBSD (FreeNAS, pfSense, OPNsense), PC-BSD (desktops) and TrueOS (servers) but DragonFly examples are not present (read: I couldn’t find easily).
What about few examples for setting up the HAMMER? Minimal, medium and bigger installations, according to desktop demands and described step-by-step? MANs are good for those who knows anything (I’m not a noob, nevertheless…) but learning curve based on MANs only is dead end street.
Did you see PC cases? :) One can get headache seeing them and looking for selected mobos with CPUs or APUs run by DragonFly. But what to look for, what parts put together to have them worked with DF BSD faultlessly?
P.S. Yes, I’m fan of AMD. :)
Correction:
MANs are good for those who know something…
Harald – Thinkpad laptops are usually pretty good with the BSDs (and in general), but it’s still a guess. Hibernation is hard to do, so I don’t have much hope for that – but! The wireless may be doable. The chipset may “just” need an entry or some sort of quirk, or it may be portable from another BSD.
Stop in EFnet #dragonflybsd and bring a ‘pciconf -lv’ and perhaps a verbose dmesg, and sephe or perhaps someone else, if they have time and can find a source, can get the network going.
What are you using the linux emulation for? There may be a workaround, maybe not, but linuxemu usage seems a lot lower than I’d expect, so I’m curious what it’s required by here.
Linux64 emulation would be very useful for running commercial apps like Maya, modo, Houdini, NUKE, etc. Especially because of superb SMP implementation in DragonFly.
I’ve installed DFBSD on an AMD FX and it runs as a remote controlled pc in my house, It lacks of audio (but i don’t care if it’s my fault or a dfbsd support as it’s a server) as video card I use a passive NVIDIA (used as vesa in xorg cause I had troubles with my ati HD4770)
I put there a SSD used as swapcache and a 2 TB wd Red HDD.
2 network cards, the one in the mobo is supported and one additional (both realtek if I’m not wrong)
the mobo is an ASUS M5A97 R2.0.
I’m learning to use it so I not an expert. But It seems to be quite stable :)