It's been a long time, but IIRC the split was due to direction on SMP. 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
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 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
But FreeBSD took the mainstream approach.
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'.
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.
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.