It now supports booting from eMMC storage drives

Mar 27, 2017 21:02 GMT  ·  By

The developers of the DragonFly BSD operating system were proud to announce today, March 27, 2017, the release and immediate availability for download of DragonFly BSD 4.8.

DragonFly BSD 4.8 is a major update coming about 6 months after the last maintenance update to the previous 4.6 stable series of the BSD-based operating system. It adds numerous exciting new features and improvements, starting with updated kernel and graphics stacks adding better support for Intel Broadwell and Skylake processors.

"This release further localizes cache lines and reduces/removes cache ping-ponging on globals. For bulk builds on many-cores or multi-socket systems, we have around a 5% improvement, and certain subsystems such as namecache lookups and exec()s see massive focused improvements," reads today's announcement.

Another interesting feature added to DragonFly BSD 4.8 release is EFI support as a mainstream boot environment by creating an EFI installation for all new installs. With this in mind, it will be possible to place the /boot filesystem in its own GPT slice or in a DragonFly disklabel that is located inside a GPT slice.

You can now boot DragonFly BSD from eMMC storage devices

This release also supports booting from eMMC storage devices, as well as both high-performance and mobile PCIe SSD drives thanks to the newly implemented NVMe SSD driver that's SMP friendly. Other changes include improved kernel performance by using -O2.

Also, it looks like copy-on-write (COW) is now used for VKernels, allowing multiple ones to share a single disk image, powerd() was updated to be sensitive to both temperature and time changes, and it's possible to load non-boot-filesystem kernel modules in rc.conf instead of loader.conf.

Download DragonFly BSD 4.8 right now from our website. The full changelog is attached below for more details. This is a recommended update for all users running DragonFly BSD 4.6 or a previous release, so make sure that you install it on your machines as soon as you read this article. Don't forget to reboot!

DragonFly BSD 4.8 Changelog