DragonBox

Planned — Q3 2026

DragonBox is the storage-focused distribution — a DragonflyBSD base with HAMMER2 filesystem for enterprise storage, backup infrastructure, and as a Proxmox replacement.

Why DragonflyBSD?

DragonflyBSD brings two critical technologies:

LWKT (Lightweight Kernel Threads)

DragonflyBSD's message-passing SMP model — which Rumpk already adopts — originated here. DragonBox grafts this at the distribution level for maximum compatibility.

HAMMER2

DragonflyBSD's HAMMER2 filesystem provides:

• Instant snapshots (copy-on-write)
• Built-in compression (LZ4, zlib)
• Deduplication
• Multi-volume spanning
• Crash-safe transactions

HAMMER2 complements NexFS — it handles the heavy enterprise storage workloads while NexFS handles the sovereign/federated use cases.

Target Use Cases

Enterprise Storage

A NAS/SAN replacement with:

• HAMMER2 for large-volume storage with snapshots
• NexFS for content-addressable metadata
• UTCP for high-performance inter-node communication
• ProvChain for data integrity auditing

Proxmox Replacement

A hypervisor host that combines:

• Rumkv for hardware virtualization
• HAMMER2 for VM storage with instant snapshots
• DragonflyBSD networking for high-throughput I/O
• Nexus security model for tenant isolation

Backup Infrastructure

Cold storage and backup with:

• HAMMER2 compression and deduplication
• NexFS Archive profile for long-term retention
• ProvChain for backup integrity verification

Build

nexus build --profile=core --dist=dragonbox --arch=x86_64 --variant=storage
nexus build --profile=fleet --dist=dragonbox --arch=x86_64 --variant=hypervisor