Blogging All About BSDs

Buildworlds are now much faster, because they can run themselves in parallel.  Invoke it using the -j option to make.  Matthew Dillon saw a 25% reduction in time when using ‘make -j 12 buildworld’ on a 4-core system.  You may need to manually update xinstall and mkdir:

        cd /usr/src/usr.bin/xinstall
        make clean; make obj; 
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Venkatesh Srinivas made a minor change to a ddb backtrace – it now prints the raw instruction pointers.  On x86_64, a backtrace would not print the correct objects out, so this is better.  It’s a minor change, but I’m pointing it out because it totally helped solve a problem for me on a package-building machine.

Jan Lentfer has updated ldns in DragonFly to version 1.6.11.  This brings in a bunch of bugfixes, which can be viewed at the ldns site’s changelog.

The general rule of thumb is that if you have a function written in an interpreted language (Perl, Python, etc.), it’ll be faster in C.  If you need it faster than that, you go to assembly.  Prepare to have your world rocked: Venkatesh Srinivas found that strlen() in libc was actually slower written in assembly than in C.  His commit

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It’s another throughput tweak from Sepherosa Ziehau: soaccept is run differently when pulling in network data from a socket.  The commit message once again shows the results of the change using httperf.

As Brooks Davis kindly posted to users@, FOSDEM 2012 will have a “BSD Licensed Operating System Developers Room”.  This has the most value to you if you’ll be near Brussels, February 4th and 5th.

As Brooks Davis kindly posted to users@, FOSDEM 2012 will have a “BSD Licensed Operating System Developers Room”.  This has the most value to you if you’ll be near Brussels, February 4th and 5th.

Siju George asked about how he could figure out which serial number (in /dev/serno) maps to which disk.  Tim Darby posted a script he used for it, or you can just use devattr(8).  There’s also a linking trick described by Chris Turner to remember how the names map.

Happy (post) Turkey Day for the U.S. readers!  A light link week this week.

• Facebook is bad for the Internet.  ‘Gaslighting’ is a new term to me.  As that article points out, I can’t even put my posts to the Digest onto Facebook in any sort of automated way.  Facebook suggests that of course I’d love to retype them

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Binutils in DragonFly is now up to version 2.22 – the commit linked is one of several.