[4] Dillon started DragonFly in the belief that the techniques adopted for threading and symmetric multiprocessing in FreeBSD 5[5] would lead to poor performance and maintenance problems.

DragonFly's messaging subsystem has the ability to act in either a synchronous or asynchronous fashion, and attempts to use this capability to achieve the best performance possible in any given situation.

[10] According to developer Matthew Dillon, progress is being made to provide both device input/output (I/O) and virtual file system (VFS) messaging capabilities that will enable the remainder of the project goals to be met.

While both Linux and FreeBSD 5 employ fine-grained mutex models to achieve higher performance on multiprocessor systems, DragonFly does not.

Among other things, the use of serializing tokens prevents many of the situations that could result in deadlocks and priority inversions when using mutexes, as well as greatly simplifying the design and implementation of a many-step procedure that would require a resource to be shared among multiple threads.

[15] DragonFly switched to multiprocessor safe slab allocator, which requires neither mutexes nor blocking operations for memory assignment tasks.

[17] Since release 1.8 DragonFly has a virtualization mechanism similar to User-mode Linux,[18] allowing a user to run another kernel in the userland.

[9][11] The vkernel has two important differences from the real kernel: it lacks many routines for dealing with the low-level hardware management and it uses C standard library (libc) functions in place of in-kernel implementations wherever possible.

As both real and virtual kernel are compiled from the same code base, this effectively means that platform-dependent routines and re-implementations of libc functions are clearly separated in a source tree.

[6][22] Eventually, maintaining compatibility with pkgsrc proved to require more effort than was initially anticipated, so the project created DPorts, an overlay on top of the FreeBSD Ports collection.

HAMMER was developed specifically for DragonFly BSD to provide a feature-rich yet better designed analogue of the increasingly popular ZFS.

[32] As with FreeBSD and OpenBSD, the developers of DragonFly BSD are slowly replacing pre-function prototype-style C code with more modern, ANSI equivalents.

Similar to other operating systems, DragonFly's version of the GNU Compiler Collection has an enhancement called the Stack-Smashing Protector (ProPolice) enabled by default, providing some additional protection against buffer overflow based attacks.

Unlike its parent FreeBSD, DragonFly has both stable and unstable releases in a single source tree, due to a smaller developer base.

Furthermore, as of October 2004[update], a debug kernel, which makes bug reports more useful for tracking down kernel-related problems, is installed by default, at the expense of a relatively small quantity of disk space.