Released on February 26, 2008, DragonFly 1.12 was described as a maintenance update focusing mainly on code cleanups and updates; however, some user visible changes became available. The USB and WiFi stacks were extensively reworked, increasing stability and supporting new hardware. The Hardware Sensors Framework originally developed for the OpenBSD Project was imported (via FreeBSD). SATA ATAPI support for AHCI controllers was also added. An experimental Bluetooth stack was included for testing. The version of GCC used in DragonFly was updated to version 4.1, though the older version was also available. A first version of the DragonFly Mail Agent (called dma), intended as a future replacement for sendmail, was added to the base. Older networking technologies such as ARCnet, FDDI and Token Ring support has been removed. Finally support for the 386 CPU was officially dropped.

Also of note, supporting code for the AMD64 Architecture was added, but the system still did not run in 64-bit mode. From the release notes: "Progress has been made on making more of the kernel MP safe. The network path has a good chance of getting there by the end of the year. The I/O path still needs a lot of work." Preliminary work on the new clustering file system, called HAMMER, was added, but it was not enabled.