Better database handling for DragonFly BSD 3.2.1

The clustering-centric DragonFly BSD distribution has had its database performance boosted in the newly released version 3.2.1. Work on the scheduler has allowed performance with PostgreSQL to perform five times as many transactions per second compared to the previous DragonFly BSD 3.0 in some scenarios, according to benchmarks. The performance is now roughly of the same magnitude as that of Scientific Linux 6.2 (and by extension, probably similar to that of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2).

Another major change is the incorporation of USB4BSD, the USB driver for FreeBSD 8, which enables many more USB device compatibility, though as a new feature it is currently disabled by default. Other changes in the kernel include a segment-aligning mmap() when appropriate, clustering of I/O requests up to 128KB, a new filesystem independent quota subsystem and the incorporation of some Google Summer of Code projects such as PUFFS. Hardware drivers have been added for the Ivy Bridge random number generator and a number of Highpoint RockerRAID controllers. There have also been improvements to mount which now attempts to identify filesystems being mounted and a various packages, including sh, gcc, grep, gdb, zlib, ncurses, OpenSSL and libpcap, have been updated.

DragonFly BSD 3.2.1 is available to download as bootable CD and USB Live ISO images for 32- and 64-bit x86 systems from the project's mirror servers. At the time of writing, the project's official download page had yet to be updated to point to the new version. Information on supported hardware is also available.

(djwm)