Hi roddierod,
I have been looking at DragonFly for a while, but my understanding is that there is no support for Nvidia cards. Am I wrong?
Kindest regards,
M
Only FreeBSD has full support for Nvidia cards. DragonFly has excellent support for Intel graphics that are mostly on par with what Linux has since they use the same DRM interface from what I understand.
DragonFly would be a logical move for a FreeBSD user, they use the same ports/pkg system and lot of the setup etc. is so similar that the FreeBSD handbook is rather useful.
However there are no really good hypervisors supported (bhyve and virtualbox require a kernel module that has to be ported). Qemu doesn't have hardware acceleration on DragonFly and their virtual kernel seems to only really be useful for testing and debugging kernel code.
Other than that they have pf, a ground up lockless implementation of IPFW3, support for fast filesystem caches (NVME etc.) and it plays well with really new hardware.
For laptops, no suspend/resume unfortunately : ( but low power CPU states are supported which get quite close.
Its also a screamingly fast OS.
Update:
Almost forgot some other bits worth mentioning...
Linux compat is not supported on DragonFly, it was removed entirely (OpenBSD did the same). So you will need natively built applications.
LibreSSL is default.
64-bit only, no other architectures other than x86 are currently supported. Although there has been talk of porting to ARM.
No ZFS support...for volume management you will want a hardware RAID controller. Areca and LSI RAID controllers work very well.
Dragonfly's UFS and FreeBSD's UFS are not compatible. HAMMER1 is rock solid stable HAMMER2 is being actively developed and being prepared for multi-master clustering, networked RAID and self healing.