This upcoming Monday should be exciting! It’s the planned date for the release of DragonFly 2.10. Also, the accepted projects for Google Summer of Code (including for DragonFly) will be announced.
The DragonFly 2.10 branch was a bit later than predicted, but that was mostly to avoid merging work. Release should still be in a few days.
Thomas Nikolajsen has put together more information on Hammer, including formatting and the new deduplication features, conveniently located in the man pages and some other spots.
If you have a USB printer, you may not have been able to print since the kqueue changes came in for… DragonFly 2.8? Anyway, Matthew Dillon’s made some changes to ulpt(4) that means USB and kqueue play nicely together.
The usual way for building pkgsrc packages from source is ‘bmake install clean’, to build and install the package, and then clean the work files from building it. Since the recent change to DESTDIR, where a binary package is built before installation, you may want to add ‘package-clean’ to the list, so that the binary package is also removed after installation.
I hope I can get this together.
- This article asks “Does anyone in Silicon Valley care about Windows anymore?” It’s an inflammatory title, to get you to read it, and it’s based on anecdotal ideas, but I think there’s some truth to it.
- Something similar, in hardware: I see people who care about what they run either getting a Macbook or a Thinkpad these days. (I’ve owned both, and they are nice laptops…) Let’s run with that idea, in fact: Macbook is to Thinkpad running BSD as is… iPhone is to Android phone running custom ROM? This is turning into a “levels of nerditry” sort of comparison.
- Community is your best feature, a talk about how to encourage the growth of an open source group. I link to it because it’s useful and well done, but also because it lets me feel a bit self-congratulatory; we already use many of the listed concepts in DragonFly.
- Zero knowledge user identification is interesting, though it’s not something you could apply to a lot of users. (via)
- Things found via Google: A DragonFly 2.8.2 x86_64 VMWare image on Sourceforge. Don’t know who put it there.
- This article about passwords says multiple common words make more secure passwords than adding upper/lower case and numbers to passwords. An interesting contention, though I don’t think it works as well as it’s described. (Adding ” ” into the list of possible characters isn’t as effective as having to double the list for case, for instance.)
- It’s been a while since I posted a roguelike link. Well, how about “How Rogue Ended Up On The Sofa“? (via) It very nicely draws a line connecting rogue and a whole lot of modern games.
If you’re running DragonFly 2.9, now is a good time to update and try various ACPI-related things, like power button shutdowns and battery monitoring. Sepherosa Ziehau has been updating vigorously.
There’s a new Supported Hardware page on dragonflybsd.org. I think the idea is not to be comprehensive, since that’s a nigh-impossible task. Instead, it’s to note the combinations of hardware that work really well.
Sepherosa Ziehau has made some changes to default SCI settings in ACPI. This may make it possible to boot a computer, or to boot a computer with ACPI, that did not boot before. If it causes problems, he lists some various tunables to set. Just don’t ask me what SCI does.
Hey, it rhymes! Matthew Dillon’s added support for 4-port Gigabit Ethernet PCI-E cards from Intel. I wish I had one.
No, 2.10 is not out. I built packages for pkgsrc-2011Q1 on 2.9, and set it to think 2.10 so that the pkgsrc tools wouldn’t complain. We’re close enough to release that this shouldn’t be a problem. The packages are available for x86_64; i386 packages coming “soon”. See my note to users@dragonflybsd.org for details on accessing these packages.
I love graphs. Jan Lentfer made some! Both of these show recent speed improvements in DragonFly – especially some spectacular results from swapcache(8) and the recent NCQ tagging improvements. (Note that only the third graph represents the NCQ improvements; the first two graphs were done before.)
The first one is a comparison of pgbench running on the same hardware twice – once with the 2.8 release of DragonFly, and once with a recent 2.9 version. 2.9 is definitely looking to be faster than 2.8.
Next up is a 2.9 system run with and without swapcache, showing an astounding difference between the two. It’s pretty clear just how much performance improvement you can get from swapcache… (see Jan’s notes on the setup after the graphic.)
Jan’s notes, from EFNet #dragonflybsd on IRC:
15:08 < lentferj> these are SELECT-Only tests
15:09 < lentferj> JustinS: it’S important to note, that the database is 2,5x
bigger than RAM on the swapchache test
15:11 < lentferj> JustinS: I did a Select-Only ramp-up of 30 minutes to get
caches and swapcache filled
15:12 < lentferj> JustinS: and then I ran
15:13 < lentferj> for i in 1 2 3 4 6 8 12 16 24 32; do
/usr/lib/postgresql/8.4/bin/pgbench -U pgsql -h atom -s 400
-S -c “$i” -T 600 pgbench; done
15:13 < lentferj> so, select only pgbench for 10 minutes each
15:13 < lentferj> with increasing numbers of client
15:14 < lentferj> pgbench on another box, 100MBit switched network
15:15 < lentferj> JustinS: the first graph (2.8.2 vs current) is the same w/ a
database that fits in RAM entirely
15:15 < lentferj> so measuring concurrency performance (w/o I/O)
15:17 < lentferj> the swapcache comparison was on a 2GB box with a 5GB database
and 16GB swapcache (INTEL) attached to a sili card
15:17 < lentferj> on a atom 330 :)
Now, here’s testing with the recent NCQ tagging update for AHCI:
These results are astonishing. Please, someone compare with other operating systems!
Here’s the stats for this last test:
- 5.6GB database, system w/ 2GB RAM –> io benchmark
- pgbench with increasing no of client 1->32, SELECT-Only Mode
- sili controller Dawicontrol DC-3410 SATA PCI controller which is using a Silicon Image 3124-2 chip
- 2 Seagate Barracuda ES.2 250GB SATA II disks
- lvm stripe over those disks
- postgresql.conf is default, except shared_buffers set to 512MB and effective_cache_size to 1024MB
- atom330 on a Foxconn mobo
- SSD is SATA INTEL SSDSA2M040 2CV1
Get out your wallet! I encourage purchasing here.
- You should buy a SSD. Not necessarily news to you, but that article does a good job of summarizing why.
- On the other hand, SSD prices are already on their way up/availability is way down. Japan’s disasters are having a ripple effect through the high-tech supply chain. Either buy immediately or get ready to wait for a while…
- Introduction to Architecting Systems for Scale – you either don’t care, or find scaling questions immediately engaging. I am one of the latter, so here’s the link.
- I’ve been watching pkgsrc-changes@netbsd.org for a little while. One thing I’ve discovered: there’s a lot of updates going on! Another thing that’s nice to see: DragonFlyupdates, including ones that help with our move to gcc 4.4.
- Aw, no more Kermit. (via) Not that I have a use for it at this point, but still: aww. I bet in about 10 years I’ll say the same thing about… gopher? Remember that? It’s not even supported in Firefox 4 now, which kinda makes me feel sad. And old.
- Server plans: Facebook vs. Google. (warning: Facebook article is somewhat giddy.)
- The infinite hard drive. (via I lost it, sorry)
Here’s an extra little thing: next time you’re dealing with dusty computer equipment, remember this picture:
That is what happens to an exposed RJ45 port after a few years in a salt mine (my employer). This was inside an enclosed, mostly-sealed structure, too.
Peter Avalos squeezed in one more thing before the DragonFly2.10 branch: an update of OpenSSH to version 5.8-p1. This is mostly a security fix upgrade to 5.7 – see the OpenSSH release notes for details.
There’s been plenty of discussion about Summer of Code projects on the mailing lists. One conversation about “Implementing a mirror target for the device mapper” led to a longer description from Venkatesh Srinivas about mirroring and how he’s looked at implementation.
Branch tomorrow, release in 2 weeks. There’s a ton of new features for 2.10, so this will be a fun release. I’m trying to get pkgsrc-2011Q1 packages built for 2.10 ahead of time, too.
Welcome John Marino, who has been working on some rather difficult updates for gcc and other toolchain items.
Matthew Dillon made some changes to swapcache(8). Swapcache is now able to cache a lot more data, and the result is that general disk performance for _all_ disks is accelerated by an included SSD using swapcache. Performance previously restricted to all-SSD systems or serious RAID setups is now possible with much less investment.
In addition to that, the long-term wear on the SSD appears to be less of a problem than expected.
I already noted that the quarterly release is out, but the pkgsrc-2011Q1 release announcement is available now. There’s good reasons to link to it – the list of updated packages, new packages, and credits for the work people have been doing. Here’s the part I really want to pick out:
We’re aiming to make this the last branch to support non-DESTDIR packages. We have almost finished the transition to DESTDIR installation, where a staging directory is used to make a binary package, which is then managed by the pkg_install tools.
The reason I’m highlighting this is: it’s good news! One of the long-term complaints with pkgsrc is that the upgrade process is painful. If you try to build an upgrade and the build processfails after uninstalling the existing package, not only are you not getting the upgrade, but you’ve lost the existing package. Binary packages for download helps with this (and generally is faster), but only so many packages can be built separately and made available for download.
Building a package separately and then installing from there removes these issues. No binary redistribution issues, actual downtime is minimal, and the package is known to work when an upgrade happens. This removes most of the problems I’ve heard raised about pkgsrc over the years.