Blogging All About BSDs

Well, they’re still available, but you don’t want them in your config any more because they can slow you down.  This will only affect you if you are running binary files from DragonFly 1.2 or earlier, or…  I guess a 4.3 BSD binary?  From 1986?  I’m sure there’s some other reason for it to be there.

Matthew Dillon wrote up an explanation of how performance on systems with a lot of CPU cores has been significantly improved – up to 300%!  (He says 200%, but I think he’s treating it as a percentage of a whole rather than percent changed.)  Apparently finally getting rid of lock contention is the trick.

Antonio Huete Jimenez’s ‘libhammer‘, a library to make various Hammer functions available to userland programs, has been added.  It implements ‘hammer info’ only at this point, if I understand correctly.

Samuel Greear, Jan Lentfer, and others are looking at Postgres scaling on DragonFly.  The work they are doing isn’t in the tree yet, but here’s a graph showing some of the performance differences.

It’s snowing in the northeast U.S., which makes me happy!  Keep going, sky!

• Richard Stallman’s requirements when giving talks/lectures.  (via)  I read this not unreasonable but long list and thought about it.  Every requirement on there probably has an experience/story behind it… (“If you can find a host for me that has a friendly parrot, I will

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Francois Tigeot does something very useful: he monitors the resource usage on his systems, and tracks how it changes over time.  Because of that, he noticed that the recent VM changes in DragonFly have made quite a difference in memory usage.  (See the green area in the attached chart, around week 42.)

Michael Lucas is building jails on DragonFly, and his story of doing so works pretty well as a how-to guide.

John Marino’s moved GCC from 4.4.6 to 4.4.7, but you’ll have to see the changelog for details.  Except it’s so new it isn’t listed… yet.

Sepherosa Ziehau made some changes that led to a 10% and then 20% gain (don’t know if that was cumulative or separate) in network speed for DragonFly.  That’s great!  It only has a noticeable effect if you’re on 10G Ethernet, though.  The obvious answer to that: upgrade your network.

It’s out, titled “The Inevitability of IPv6″, and featuring an article by yours truly on the upcoming DragonFly release.  (I thought it was already published?  I’m not sure.)

Francois Tigeot recently presented a set of slides about Hammer at a recent Irill conference.  PDFs of the slides are available at his site, in English and French.

DragonFly’s now on the BuildFarm list of Postgres test systems.  (via Jan Lentfer in IRC)

Did you know that there’s a BSDDay 2011 in Bratislava, Slovakia, on November 5th?  Well, I do thanks to a random Google search and now you do too.  You and I both need to keep watching BSD Events.

Samuel Greear graphed the performance differences for Postgres and MySQL on DragonFly, before and after the recent VM changes.  Note that 1: this was done a little while ago, so I think the performance difference would be even greater now, and 2: this was graphed versus the already-performing-better 2.12, not the current stable release of 2.10.

Not a lot of links this week, for some reason.

• The best obituary I’ve seen yet for Dennis Ritchie, where he’s contrasted with Steve Jobs.
• The best paper abstract ever.
• Michael Lucas documents his DragonFly update.
• Our tcplay TrueCrypt implementation is getting noticed.
• pkgin-0.51 is available in pkgsrc-current, though it’s not in the most recent quarterly release.

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Google’s running the Code-In project again for 2011, where open source projects mentor 13-17-year-olds on a variety of small projects.  DragonFly participated last year and had lots of good work done.  However, we need ideas, the more the better.  Please add whatever comes to mind.

That would be a recent ATI card, though I don’t know exactly which model name.  Samuel Greear has imported David Shao’s DRM work, originally for Summer of Code, last year.  Most newer Radeons should work (?).

There’s a rare crash in DragonFly 2.10, where applications would segfault.  The system would run find.  This is apparently more likely to happen in 2.12, though reports on this vary.  It’s real, though.

Matthew Dillon went looking for this bug, and happened to roll back vm_token, the last lock in DragonFly that presented a serious impediment to multiprocessing.  It’s

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I didn’t know this existed, but there it is: the BSD Router Project is a software router, which just reached version 1.0.  (via)