Blogging All About BSDs

User ‘Zenny’ asked questions about setting up a server similar to ones described in this presentation, except using DragonFly and Hammer.  Most of it is possible now, going by the thread.

Tim Bisson’s work on TRIM support has been committed.  I don’t know if it will show in 2.12, but it’s off by default so it would seem a safe move.

There’s only one multiprocessing bottleneck left in DragonFly: vm_token.  Matthew Dillon’s working on removing it, and he’s been testing his initial results on a 4-core machine and a 48-core machine, using heavily parallelized buildworlds to test concurrency.  He’s posted the results, showing an initial speedup of up to 30%.  This definitely isn’t going to make it into 2.12, but

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Technology Innovation Management Review, the replacement for the Open Source Business Resource, has its first issue out.  There’s still an open source focus, despite the name change.

Venkatesh Srinivas sent along a graph of his nmalloc testing that shows mysql threading performance on DragonFly, from slightly over a year ago.  Both graphs were done on a 4-core system, though I don’t know if the specs are comparable, so the curve is important.  Look at the just-posted curve for comparison.  That’s how much things have improved.

In fact,

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Samuel Greear has graphed out the performance of both MySQL and Postgres on DragonFly 2.12 as you add threads.  There’s a very nice correlation on performance and number of cores.  For comparison, there’s this old test from 2007 which shows uniprocessor performance to be good but not improved by adding cores.  The tests were on completely different hardware, so

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The 2.12 branching generated a list of every DragonFly commit since 2.10, grouped by committer.  Good to browse through.  Try to ignore the part where it shows the measly 4 things I did, with poorly constructed commit messages.

You’ll see Steve Jobs memorials all over the place for the next few days, but here’s something that won’t get mentioned much: He probably is responsible for putting UNIX – real, BSD-based UNIX – in the hands of more people than anyone else, ever.

It’s not the 2.12 release yet – just the initial branch of 2.12.   This will become the release version of 2.12 in a few weeks.

The latest quarterly release of pkgsrc is out.  You can download it via CVS, or update /usr/Makefile to pull down the correct branch.  I’ll be building binaries as soon as I can.  I like the release announcement style.

Matthew Dillon and Venkatesh Srinivas have committed several fixes for some elusive problems.  If you’ve had an unexplained crash, this may keep it from repeating.  If you haven’t had a wierd crash (like me)… great!

Did you notice zgrep went missing?  Well, it’s available again, thanks to YONETANI Tomokazu.