DragonFlyBSD Pushes Big Sound System Update, Borrowed From FreeBSD

Users of DragonFlyBSD on the desktop (or otherwise using sound on this popular BSD platform) will benefit from the next major update of the operating system.

DragonFlyBSD has pulled in the sound system from the FreeBSD 11 development code and it offers a huge improvement over the previous code, which was from FreeBSD 6.x.

With this new sound system update there's smarter volume controls, improved HDMI/DisplayPort audio, an easy way to switch the default sound device, and HTML5/YouTube videos should now play with sound out-of-the-box. There's also new hardware support with this new sound update.

As with Linux, FreeBSD/DragonFlyBSD sound has improved a lot too since 2007 (the time of DragonFlyBSD's last sound update). DragonFlyBSD pulling big code projects from FreeBSD isn't a huge surprise as it's frequently done by BSD operating systems from sharing of the ported DRM/KMS drivers to other areas of the kernel. For those new to the BSD world, DragonFlyBSD is also a fork of FreeBSD 4.

The sound system upgrade for DragonFlyBSD was completed last week and shared via this mailing list post.