Blogging All About BSDs

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.

Francois Tigeot has updated his PDF of Postgres benchmarks with some OpenIndiana results.  They’re crazy high, though he reported some freezes too, as with Linux.

BSDTalk 208 is out, where Will Backman talks for 15 minutes about how he uses BSD in his University of Maine UNIX class.

Some time ago, Matthew Dillon worked on a bulk build system that built as much of pkgsrc in parallel as possible.  It’s in the tree now as ‘fastbulk‘, for anyone wanting to try it out.  I used it a bit; I didn’t measure the degree of speed increase, but was able to get about 70% of the packages

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Sepherosa Ziehau has implemented another networking speedup.  Read the commit message for details on what he changed, since it’s rather in-depth.  He shows an 18% improvement in netperf results.

Matthew Dillon has written a contiguous memory mapper, which is designed to fix problems with video cards and USB drives that need a big chunk of memory to keep.  This can affect booting or later on, when disconnecting/reconnecting a USB drive.  If this still doesn’t fix the problem for you, try adjusting the sysctl ‘vm.dma_reserved’ to something bigger, like

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When building world and kernel on DragonFly, /usr/obj is where the work files get placed.  This can eat a bit of space, but it can be safely deleted.  If you keep the files around, subsequent rebuilds can be done faster with a quickwork/quickkernel, but this may not matter to you.

(This was answered on the mailing lists by Max

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Hey, the date’s sorta palindromic!  Sorta.

• “Bundled, Buried and Behind Closed Doors” – a video description of the physical parts of the Internet.  Remember when MAE-East or MAE-West would have a bad day and half the Internet felt it?  Really, half.  I don’t think I’m exaggerating. (via)
• Google has a verbatim search mode now, for those of

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Remember the Postgres benchmark I described here a few days ago?  Francois Tigeot has updated it with numbers from Scientific Linux running the same pgbench procedure.  (see page 2)  If you’re too lazy to look at the PDF, his summary is this: Linux is fastest of all, and also crashes the most.

Sepherosa Ziehau has implemented an asynchronous pru_send in sendfile.  The results are a 70-90% increase in performance, as shown in his netperf localhost test.