DragonFly BSD was forked from FreeBSD 4.8 in June of 2003, by Matthew Dillon. The project is "the logical continuation of the FreeBSD 4.x series", as quoted in [Matthew Dillon's announcement](http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2003-July/006889.html).

DragonFly has been going through rapid development ever since, working towards the goal of creating a single system image across multiple computers. In the process of moving towards this goal, improvements to the code have been made and changes from other BSDs have been brought in.

From 2003 (when DragonFly first forked from FreeBSD), to early 2007,
the DragonFly project focused on rewriting most of the major kernel
subsystems to implement required abstractions and support mechanics
for the second phase of the project.  This involved a great deal of work
in nearly every subsystem, particularly the filesystem APIs and kernel core.
During all of this we have managed to keep the system updated with regards
to the third party applications and base system utilities needed to make
any system usable in production.  We have also adopted the [pkgsrc](http://www.pkgsrc.org/) system for
management of all non-base-system third-party applications in order to pool
our resources with other BSD projects using the system.

In the 2007-2008 time-frame a new filesystem called [[HAMMER|hammer]] was developed
for DragonFly.  HAMMER saw its first light of day in the July 2008
2.0 release.  This filesystem has been designed to solve numerous issues
and to add many new capabilities to DragonFly, such as fine-grained
snapshots, instant crash recovery, and near real-time mirroring.
The Hammer filesytem is also intended to serve as a basis for the clustering
work that makes up the second phase of the project.

Further information on the project goals and status are available on this website, and discussion of the project is possible on a variety of newsgroups and mailing lists.