Obtaining DragonFly 1.8.x for your system

1.8.1 ISO Images for CDs

DragonFly CDs are 'live', which means that the CD will boot your system and let you log in as root (no password). You can use this feature to check for hardware compatibility and play with DragonFly a little before actually installing it on your hard drive.

The CD includes an installer that can be run at the console, or (experimentally) via a web browser. Make sure you read the README file for more information. To activate the installer, boot the CD and login as 'installer'.

The installer has a Netboot server option. You can boot the CD on one machine, enable the feature via the installer, and then PXEBoot other systems and do a network based install. System operators should be aware that running the netboot server hardwires a 10.1.0.X network and runs a DHCP server which might interfere with other DHCP servers on your LAN.

See the 'Download Site' list below for a list of download locations.

The MD5 for the release is:
MD5 (dfly-1.8.0_REL.iso) = d5ffce6709ca82be458d95634d73a58b
MD5 (dfly-1.8.0_REL.iso.gz) = 893b606ce5c0f156ea74c57ebf554c2b
MD5 (dfly-1.8.1_REL.iso) = 98b4cfd6f8aabf49acf7a81d75368156
MD5 (dfly-1.8.1_REL.iso.gz) = fdafd2df5f48df4f7fdf0ff0b9ecee0c

1.8.x Release Errata

DragonFly releases are meant to be stable, dependable entities. We backport compatible bug fixes from current development into release branches but we do not generally backport new features. The release CD is always a '.0', e.g. 1.6.0. The most common way to track a release is to use cvsup to track the release sources and then build and install a new world and kernel to keep your system updated.

We do not always get every last little fix into a release. Please be sure to read the errata page for the release CD!

Version Date Comments
1.8.0 30-Jan-2007 RELEASE CD Errata
1.8.1 27-Mar-2007 RELEASE CD Errata

1.8.x Release Sites

Organization Mirrored Data Access methods
Chlamydia.fs.ei.tum.de (Germany) 1.8.1_REL image HTTP FTP
TheShell.com 1.8.1_REL image HTTP FTP
high5.net (Amsterdam) 1.8.1_REL image HTTP
Dragonflybsd.org (USA) 1.8.1_REL image FTP (try to find another site first)

Release Notes for DragonFly 1.8.1

Release Notes for DragonFly 1.8.0

1.8 is our fifth major DragonFly release. DragonFly's policy is to only commit bug fixes to release branches.

The biggest kernel change in this release is the addition of virtual kernel support and a virtual kernel build target (VKERNEL). Virtual kernels are systems-in-a-box... you can run a complete kernel as a userland process. All standard non-hardware-specific applications will run inside the virtual kernel. Performance depends on how heavily an application interacts with the VM system and how often it makes system calls, since these operations have to be forwarded by the real kernel to the virtual kernel.

The biggest user-visible changes include updates to third party applications included in the base system, a major rewrite of NULLFS which removes all directory recursion restrictions from mount_null and removes nearly all the kernel resource overhead when using such mounts, and a multi-ip feature for jails.

A more complete list is included below. We consider 1.8 to be more stable then 1.6.