Matthew Dillon has announced the release of DragonFly BSD 1.10, the sixth major DragonFly release since the project's creation in 2003. The release notes say "we consider 1.10 to be more stable then 1.8," and summarize some of the new features:

"Several big-ticket items are present in this release. Our default ATA driver has been switched to NATA (ported from FreeBSD). NATAs big claim to fame is support for AHCI which is the native SATA protocol standard. It is far, far better then the old ATA/IDE protocol. DragonFly now has non-booting support for GPT partitioning and 64 bit disklabels. Non-booting means we don't have boot support for these formats yet. DragonFly's Light Weight Process abstraction is now finished and working via libthread_xu but the default threading library is not quite ready to be changed from libc_r yet. All threaded programs now link against an actual 'libpthread' which is a softlink to libc_r or libthread_xu, allowing the new threading library to be tested more fully."

"1.10 has been branched," DragonFlyBSD creator Matt Dillon announced, noting that the official release is expected soon, "no release date has been set yet but this coming weekend is looking real good now." Among the new features of DragonFly 1.10 are improved virtual kernel support, a new disk management infrastructure, improvements to wireless networking, and support for the new syslink protocol.

DragonFlyBSD has a stable release every six months. The current development branch is numbered 1.11, with the next stable release at the end of the year numbered 2.0. The 1.10 release has been delayed about a week while some final bugs were addressed. Matt noted:

"The 1.10 release is looking a lot better now. We are basically just waiting for a new pkgsrc bootstrap kit and a little more testing. All major issues except booting a machine with a USB root with EHCI loaded have been resolved."