DragonFlyBSD 5.4 Released With NUMA Improvements, GCC 8 Compiler & HAMMER2 Updates

Days ahead of the FreeBSD 12.0 release, the long-ago-forked DragonFlyBSD is out with its very exciting 5.4 six-month feature update.

DragonFlyBSD 5.4 is easily this BSD operating system's most exciting feature release in a while. DragonFlyBSD 5.4 now ships with GCC 8 as its default compiler as a big upgrade over the previous GCC5 default, there is much better support for asymmetric NUMA configurations particularly Zen / Threadripper 2 hardware in particular, various performance improvements (including in the area of SMP), updates to DPorts, and a lot of other kernel tuning and performance work.

DragonFlyBSD's original HAMMER2 file-system has also seen its share of improvements, various VM/virtualization driver updates, updates to the Radeon/DRM graphics driver code, and a number of networking updates.

More details on DragonFlyBSD 5.4 and download information is available from DragonFlyBSD.org. Some fresh BSD vs. Linux benchmarks will be coming up on Phoronix in the days ahead.