Posts in category DragonFlyBSD Digest
Rebuild everything if you’re running ...
This latest commit for the new scheduler means that on your next update, you will want to build a new kernel, and probably a new world too. This only applies if you’re running DragonFly 3.1, of course.
Lazy Reading for 2012/09/23
The weather is finally turning cooler, which makes me happy.
I don’t think I’ve seen this before: Very old UNIX releases, listed for running in emulation. (via)
Where the red-black tree name came from. A red-black tree underpins Hammer 1′s data structures, though it does not in Hammer 2. (also via)
Someone with a HP (Re [...]
Mailing list archives updated back to...
I got the old mailing list archives converted to Mailman. As I wrote in a post to users@, please let me know about problems. There’s some garbled messages from the old archive that were placed into the 2012-Sept. section for each message; I’ll be cleaning those up manually.
Posting but not reading mailing lists
The old mailing list software for @dragonflybsd.org mailing lists, bestserv, apparently allowed people not subscribed to a list to post to it, after answering a confirmation message for each message posted.
The closest way to duplicate that for Mailman is to sign up for the list you want, and then turn off mail delivery for your email address [...]
3 different conventions, 1 pile of th...
BSD Events linked to the presentations for FOSDEM 2012, BSD-Day Europe 2012, and BSDCan 2012. There’s a lot of reading there for you – and even some video.
A flurry of fixes and scheduler impro...
The combination of Mihai Carabas’s successful Summer of Code work on the scheduler and the recent Postgres benchmarking got Matthew Dillon to start thinking about making UNIX domain sockets work better, a shortcut around the buffer cache, scheduler improvements and then a new default scheduler, along with a change in idle CPU behavior. [...]
Notes on smartmontools
Smartmontools will catch impending disk failures about 2/3 of the time, so it’s useful to run it and interpret the results. The results can be somewhat complex, though. However, it can be useful to look at other people talking about the output and glean knowledge from the context.
A bikeshed and a code change
A discussion of why root automatically lists dotfiles with ls and all other users do not led to a long thread that includes some UNIX history. There’s some useful and some not-so-useful parts in the thread, but it did indirectly produce a way to reverse the listing effect itself.
SYSV shared memory vs. mmap
Francois Tigeot benchmarked the recent Postgres 9.3 release. Postgres apparently switched to using mmap instead of SYSV shared memory, and Francois has done this to show the performance differences. (view the PDF in his post.) Of course, work has continued since this was posted, so there should be new numbers soon, and new changes I’ [...]
Pkgsrc freeze has started
See the note on pkgsrc-users@. The next quarterly release, pkgsrc-2012Q3, should be fully baked by the end of the month, if all goes well.
Lazy Reading for 2012/09/16
Yay!
What will you have: tea or chai? Mapping out all the names for tea around the world. I love etymology and tea, and I know there’s some tea drinkers reading… (via)
Speaking of tea, this London universal tea device sounds awesome. (via)
Uncle Miod’s machineroom. There’s some pictures of some old hardware (Rea [...]
When is DragonFly 3.2 coming out?
Probably not for a few weeks, at least.
pkgsrc freeze for 2012Q3 starts tomor...
As seen in this pkgsrc-users@ post from Thomas Klausner, the freeze for pkgsrc-2012Q3 starts on Sunday and continues for (probably) two weeks before the release.
NYCBUG, RSS, and SMPng
NYCBUG, the NY BSD user’s group, has an RSS feed for their speaker events, found via Dru Lavigne’s always useful BSD Events twitter. The next event at the start of October is a talk about SMPng in FreeBSD. Given that it was the project that in part led to the creation of DragonFly, I’d like to hear about (Read more...)
Do you have offline Hammer1 slave sys...
If you do, they don’t get cleaned up during the normal ‘hammer cleanup’ nightly routine. Chris Turner has added a way to manually specify them as a cleanup target.
I’m pretty sure in this case ‘offline’ means ‘nothing streaming to it from a master disk’. I think.
A potential new pkgsrc site
If you look at new.pkgsrc.org, you will see what may become a new site. This is apparently a test, so don’t react as if this was the actual site.
Experimental pmap optimizations
Matthew Dillon has created an experiment: shared page table mappings. It’s controlled by a sysctl, since it’s still experimental. The real-world effect is reducing the number of memory faults as a process uses up memory, and decreasing the overall memory usage. The obvious benchmark is Postgres speed; this makes the initial exp [...]
Do you have an ixbge(4)?
If you are using an Intel 10G Ethernet card with a 82598GB chipset, you’re using ixgbe(4). You may want to set the net.inet.tcp.sosend_agglim sysctl to a value over 12 in certain circumstances, as described by Francois Tigeot.
Some new Hammer features: scoreboards...
These are small, but they make life easier: Hammer now has a scoreboard file, for viewing of mirror-streams running in the background. There’s also a ssh-remote directive, so you can use ssh without enabling an interactive shell, and a HAMMER_RSH environment variable so different remote shells can be used. These are all for Hammer 1.
A lot of scheduler talk
If you ever wanted to read an extensive discussion about the scheduler, today’s your day. Mihai Carabas, who posted the details of a long discussion he had with Matthew Dillon about how the scheduler works. You may recall Mihai’s name from the very successful GSoC scheduler project that recently finished.
(look, a link to the ne [...]
