This is the first BSD distro to move onto GCC 5

Jun 29, 2015 14:41 GMT  ·  By

DragonFly BSD is a distribution that belongs to the same class of operating systems as other BSD-derived systems and UNIX. The developers have released a new version of the distro, and they have integrated quite a few changes and improvements.

Among the things that have been underlined by the DragonFly BSD developers for this release, we can mention better hardware support, a historic move to GCC 5.x, lot's of OpenSSL updates, a new boot screen, and many more other modifications. It's been a while since the previous 4.0 released, so a lot of stuff has been piling up. This doesn't feel like a maintenance update, and it would be wrong to think about it that way.

"Version 4.2 of DragonFly brings significant updates to i915 and Radeon support, a move to GCC 5.x (and the first BSD to do so), a replacement to Sendmail, and numerous other changes including OpenSSL updates, a new boot screen, improved sound, and improved USB support," notes the developer.

What's new since version 4.0

According to the changelog, a reapctl system call for reaper and sub-process management has been added, the slab cleanup performance has been improved, callout deadlocks in u4b has been fixed, a kqueue write filtering for U4B has been added, the code for Ext2fs has been cleaned, full acceleration (2D, 3D) is now supported on most Intel and some AMD GPUs, the kernel drm code has been updated to version 3.14, and an experimental KMS (frame buffer) console has been added.

Check out all the changes, updates and fixes in the official announcement. As usual, you can download DragonFly BSD 4.2 right now from Softpedia, but please keep in mind that this is not a Linux system, so it's going to be a little bit different. The developers do provide Live images for DragonFly BSD, with root access by default, so it won't be a problem to just give it a spin.