Justin Sherrill – Page 225 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2011/10/06

Performance curve for DragonFly 2.12

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 the actual curve of the graph is the telling point.

As he points out in his post, excellent multiprocessor performance is arriving on DragonFly, without any catastrophic shifts or destabilizing changes.

2011/10/05

2.12 change summary

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.

2011/10/05

Another Steve Jobs thing

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.

2011/10/042011/10/03

DragonFly 2.12 branched

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.

2011/10/03

pkgsrc-2011Q3 is released

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.

2011/10/022011/09/30

Lazy Reading for 2011/10/02

Yep, fall hits and it’s easier to find links.

DragonFly morphology. The insect, not the operating system, though that would make an interesting diagram.
Stick your pinkie in the corner of your mouth, Dr. Evil style, and say, “One MEEELion TCP connections on BSD!“. (via several retweets)
Sudo vs. SSH public keys.
The app store concept is taking over. Not that it’s a totally bad thing! We could implement one for pkgsrc, and should. (via)
A nice (OpenBSD-centric) walkthrough of routing. (via)
Ooh, decent disk benchmarks. I wish there were graphs, of course.
I think this happens to most CS grads; you sit around one day and say to yourself, “Hey, I could write an operating system!” This forum post shows someone getting that idea and then realizing it’s not necessarily the goal he wanted. Why do I link to it? I appreciate the optimism.
Or you can just build a functioning computer in Minecraft. This sort of thing has been happening for a while – this movie is just a link to the craziest example I’ve seen so far.

Your unrelated link of the week: Scientific Illustration. Not a comic, but still visually interesting.

2011/09/302011/09/30

A whole lot of VM fixes

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!

2011/09/30

The return of zgrep

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

2011/09/29

OSBR: now it’s TIM

The Open Source Business Resource, linked here before, has become the Technology Innovation Management Review, or TIM Review. Conveniently, the editor is named Chris, not Tim, so nobody will get confused. It’ll still cover open-source software, but it’ll also

“share the spotlight with topics such as managing innovation, technology entrepreneurship, and economic development”

The first relaunched issue will be out in October.

2011/09/28

Potential job available

A position opened up for a junior systems administrator at my workplace. You have to be willing to live near Rochester, NY, administrate a mix of Windows and unixy machines, do desktop support, and network management. (e.g. everything possible) The work environment is neat, informal, and somewhat adverse. I’ll have a job description soon, I hope.

2011/09/272011/09/27

More on DragonFly in production

Michael W. Lucas is setting up two DragonFly machines, to try out Hammer. I linked to his tweet about this in the last Lazy Reading post, but this is a more in-depth explanation of what he’s doing. So far, it just works. (as seen on Reddit, too.)

2011/09/272011/09/26

Another pkgsrc-current build complete

I finished a build of pkgsrc-current on x86_64, with a report on what built. I’ve kicked off a new build, and I expect at least 100 more packages to build thanks to John Marino’s work on pkgsrc and DragonFly.

2011/09/262011/09/25

A getcontext task to do

Want to create getcontext for DragonFly/x86_64? Apparently we need it.

2011/09/262011/09/25

Pkgsrc freeze for 2011Q3 is extended

The freeze for the next quarterly release of pkgsrc has been extended another week, to October 2nd. This will push the DragonFly 2.12 release out a ways, too.

2011/09/252011/09/24

Lazy Reading for 2011/09/25

This week’s Lazy Reading just built itself up quickly; autumn arrives in the northern hemisphere and suddenly a lot more activity starts going on.

9vx, Plan 9 as a user process. (sorta like a vkernel?) Via Sascha Wildner on IRC.
Found at the same location: You are not expected to understand this.
Michael W. Lucas, sometime BSD author, has 3 short horror stories available for free, for a limited time. Be warned; there’s no BSD in these stories, as far as I can tell. In fact, they contain genuine horror, not “and then… the server ran Windows ME!” kind of nerd horror.
Also from Mr. Lucas, it’s always nice to see DragonFly hit production.
A nice explanation of the recent TLS vulnerability. (via)
Chumby creator Bunnie Huang’s look at future hardware is optimistic, but I like it. If nothing else, it implies easier driver support. If that names seems familier, Bunnie’s MicroSD saga was previously linked here. (via)
This short Overcoming Bias post is about nanotech, but a certain sentence in there struck me as a good way to determine how you plan out your computer infrastructure (via):

There are four ways to deal with system damage: 1) reliability, 2) redundancy, 3) repair, and 4) replacement.

2011/09/24

2.12 Release issue roundup

I’ve put together a catch-all ticket for remaining issues to fix before the 2.12 release of DragonFly: Issue 2135. Several of the issues have already been dealt with by Peter Avalos and Sepherosa Ziehau, so a hat tip for them!

2011/09/21

The usual Postgres shift

As is common for the combination of new Postgres releases and new pkgsrc quarterly releases, Postgres 8.3 is going to be missing from pkgsrc-2011Q3. The default version of Postgres installed by pkgsrc will become 9.0 after that quarterly release. (9.1 is already present in pkgsrc.) This is all planned by Joerg Sonnenberger.

2011/09/202011/09/25

OpenSSH update to 5.9p1

Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSH to version 5.9p1. This might be the last thing before the next DragonFly release.

Update on the update: he updated OpenSSL (1.0.0e) and file (5.09) too.

2011/09/192011/09/18

Freeze for pkgsrc has started

As predicted and now announced, pkgsrc is now frozen for the next week. If everything goes well, we’ll have pkgsrc-2011Q3 next week.

2011/09/192011/09/18

More blogbench benchmarks

Francois Tigeot has done another set of benchmarks using blogbench to test reading and writing under different DragonFly versions, plus some OpenIndiana benchmarks just to mix it up. Writing performance seems to have drastically improved between DragonFly 2.10 and 2.11.

His post has an attached PDF with, of course, graphs. This site has previously mentioned other not-really-comparable disk testing performed by Francois.