> “ From what I recall, the FreeBSD team made the right call at the time.”

I’m not so sure.

Given how unstable FreeBSD 5 (intro of new SMP) was, until it finally stabilized multiple years later at v8.0 - I’m not sure others would have that same sentiment.

And seeing how DragonflyBSD performance is standing up to FreeBSD (and best’ing it times) even though they have a radically smaller developer community (and no corporate support) - it does challenge the topic of who was right.

I do think objectively, people would state that DragonflyBSD chose a clean/simpler architecture that’s easier to understand

https://www.phoronix.com/review/bsd-linux-eo2021

FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE was announced January 19, 2003.

Matt Dillon announced DragonFly BSD nearly 20 years ago on July,16 2003

FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE was announced Nov 25, 2009

You’re talking about events that took place over 13.5 years ago.

On the benchmarks:

Where are the Apache, NginX, PostgreSQL and Redis benchmarks?

Where are the measurements of network performance?

>Where are the Apache, NginX, PostgreSQL and Redis benchmarks?

>Where are the measurements of network performance?

You'd have to ask Larabel about that. But given that Dragonfly can seemingly trade blows with FreeBSD *18 years later* does seem to suggest there's some merits to their design

DragonflyBSD design is definitely not without merits.

But FreeBSD took the mainstream approach.

Here are some benchmarks,

https://www.dragonflybsd.org/performance/

Which are a decade old?

Oops, I was actually replying to the parent post about benchmarks from 2008.

https://www.dragonflybsd.org/performance/ Has one from 2012 and an update 2018 with a Threadripper 2990WX, though there is no comparison chart..

Oh.. here is a benchmark [0] from 2021, Dragonfly performs comparably with Ubuntu and FreeBSD 13 on an intel core i9 of some type. I have no idea whether these benchmarks reflect real world performance. I also don't know where and how much Dragonfly is used in 'production'.

[0] https://www.phoronix.com/review/corei9-freebsd13-dfly6

It was also a clash of personalities.

It was all truly unfortunate. But sometimes there are no clear right answers - but you have to make a choice between multiple bad options. When doing nothing isn't an option either then you have to make a call as to what you think the least terrible outcome will be and history will be the judge as to whether you were right.

Similar issues contributed to there being multiple *BSDs. It's never that simple of course, but it was certainly a part of it. Technical/ideology and Personality all play a part.

Is there any (ideally charitable, historical) writing about this for the uninitiated?

You've gotta be careful giving vikings a commit bit.

Your best bet for information is probably the mailing list archives. To be a bit reductive, Matt had strong opinions about SMP and threading and got his commit bit yanked. As a result he forked FreeBSD (4?) to create DragonFlyBSD. It's not so far off of how we ended up with OpenBSD really. Or as Linus put it, Theo is… difficult.

Honestly, I think these forced forks are good. They're a a perfectly natural result of getting a bunch of smart, opinionated people in a group together. They've given some incredibly smart people a much bigger sandbox to play in. As a result we've got things like openssh and hammer.

20 years later, who made the right call?