Strip away all the programs, shells, datafiles, and documentation from DragonFlyBSD, and what remains will be the core of the operating system. This is usually referred to as the 'kernel'.
Building a customized kernel can enable new hardware, remove support for unused hardware, and reduce resource usage. Some kernel behaviors can be altered without the need to rebuild the kernel itself. Updating the entire DragonFlyBSD system requires a complete build from source code of both the kernel and userland.
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