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BSD: Updates/Picks Regarding DragonFly and FreeBSD
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DragonFly BSD ☛ DPorts 2026Q4 packages for DragonFly 6.4 and 6.5 (work in progress)
Binary packages built from DPorts 2026Q4 are now available for DragonFly 6.4 and for 6.5 (master). The previous 6.4 packages were built from a 2025Q2 tree, so this is a big jump: pkg goes from 2.2 to 2.8, most of the ~32,000 packages change version, and some were renamed or removed upstream.
Please treat this set as work in progress. We will keep fixing and rebuilding over the next weeks, and some packages that were in the old set are not back yet (list below).
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University of Toronto ☛ Our example of great FreeBSD firewall performance
When we moved our firewalls from OpenBSD to FreeBSD, one of the things we were hoping to get was significantly better firewall performance. We clearly got better performance from FreeBSD than from OpenBSD, both in testing and in production, but measuring how much better things were in production was hampered by the fact that people here don't usually do truly high bandwidth traffic. Sometimes they'd download big things from the Internet and for a bit our firewalls would run at, say, 600 MBytes a second, but that wasn't common and it typically didn't last very long.