More than six months after the release of the 4.8 series, the BSD-derived DragonFly BSD operating system has been updated today to version 5.0, a major new stable series that introduces new features and numerous improvements.
Probably the biggest new feature of the DragonFly BSD 5.0 release is the introduction of a bootable variant of the next-generation HAMMER2 file system developed specifically for the operating system. Users can finally install DragonFly BSD on a HAMMER2 file system, though it is considered experimental at the moment.
“Preliminary HAMMER2 support has been released into the wild as-of the 5.0 release. This support is considered EXPERIMENTAL and should generally not yet be used for production machines and important data,” said the devs. “The boot loader will support both UFS and HAMMER2 /boot.”
When installing DragonFly BSD 5.0 on a HAMMER2 formatted disk drive, the installer will use a UFS formatted /boot partition because, by design, the file system doesn’t immediately free space when deleting or replacing files on the local disk. Also worth mentioning, this release comes with single-image HAMMER2 support.