Re: Some newbie questions

["Justin C. Sherrill" <justin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> First Question: Is DragonFly ready for production ?

Yes.  A number of people are using it in production.  You will need to
keep a good eye on it, as the current systems for third-part apps (ports,
pkgsrc) are not completely supported, and the system is under rapid
development.

On the converse side of that, DragonFly has been remarkably stable given
the rate of change and the developers around it are quick to fix.

> 2. If i choose to use FreeBSD, what do i have do pay attention to in
> order to be able to switch to DragonFly later (UFS2...) ?

FreeBSD 4 is a relatively easy upgrade.  FreeBSD 5 (in part because of
UFS2) would require a reinstall.

> 3. What is the state of journaling fs / background fsck ? We cannot wait
> hours for fsck to complete after an unclean shutdown

Matt is working on journaling, but you may want to read this post:
http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/kernel/2004-12/msg00133.html

Or just go through the whole topic:
http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/kernel/2004-12/msg00105.html

If the downtime for a reboot is that dangerous, you may want to look at
some sort of cluster or redundancy.

> Can i use the Vortex supplied FreeBSD driver?

No idea on this one.

> Are there any drawbacks concerning ports?

Not all of them work.  Usually ones that touch memory structures are
broken because of changes between FreeBSD and DragonFly.