Peter Avalos added an avalanche of updates for PAM and sh, so I’ll link to a few of them. The changes are mostly sourced from FreeBSD. The PAM changes remove pam_krb5 and pam_ksu, for which there’s an alternative.
There’s been a rare segfault present in DragonFly for quite some time. It’s been difficult to reproduce, and the 2.12 release due some months ago was held up specifically to fix it. Matthew Dillon was, after many days (months?) of work, able to replicate it reliably and eventually find a way around what appears to be a new AMD-specific bug. Read his very detailed explanation of what he did to get to this point.
Francois Tigeot benchmarked his accounting work with blogbench, and posted a PDF with the results. Dmitrij D. Czarkoff made a simpler graph, which can be used to draw the conclusion: blogbench didn’t work well for estimating the impact of VFS accounting. If you want to try accounting yourself, put vfs.accounting_enabled="1" in your /boot/loader.conf.
(The normal DragonFly mailarchive isn’t updating because it feeds from DragonFly NNTP, and that’s not updating, so I’m using Gmane for post links.)
There is now a NO_BINUTILS221 option, added by Sascha Wildner, that will keep your system from building binutils 2.21 during a buildworld. The system will still build binutils 2.22, so there will still be a functioning ld on the system. Use this along with NO_GCC41 (so only gcc 4.4 gets built) to speed up your buildworlds, if you like.
There’s a new DragonFly mirror, in Colorado, USA – at dragonflybsd.mirrorcatalogs.com. It’s on the mirrors page on the DragonFly site, too.
If you’re looking to use IPMI and remotely watch the console of another system, Matthew Dillon has made some changes to help with that.
Sepherosa Ziehau has added updated the ‘ecc’ device, for Intel E3-1200 series systems. What’s it do? It will report on memory errors, and potentially fix them.
You should have ECC memory in your server already. If not, you oughta.
Update: as Sascha Wildner pointed out, ecc(4) already existed, but didn’t support Intel controllers. Also, the Xeon X3400 series is supported now too.
Last week was low on links, but this week is great! I hope you have some time set aside.
- This article “The Strange Birth and Long Life of UNIX” has a picture of a PDP-11. I don’t know if I ever actually saw one and knew it before. (via)
- Also from the same place: Window Managers Bloodlines.
- Anecdotal, but probably true. (via luxh on EFNet #dragonfly)
- nginx is the new cool and unpronounceable web server these days, apparently. Michael Lucas covers how to transition static Apache sites over to it.
- This PDF showing slides from the recent NYCBUG presentation by Ike Levy, titled “Inappropriate Cloud Use”, is entertaining, and makes a good point. Cloud computing is cheap on a per month basis, but since it’s a reoccurring cost, it can cost a surprisingly large amount in the long run. (via)
- Hey, a patch for DragonFly (and other BSD) support in Google’s leveldb.
- “Don’t Be a Free User” (via) The last paragraph is the best.
- An expanded grep and diff. ‘grep’ and ‘diff’ have been present for so long, and people understand what they do, generally, that new tools get named after them just because the concept is ingrained in people’s minds. Note that I said “generally”, as regular expressions can be difficult. (via)
- A lot of people don’t realize how they infringe on copyright. This writeup describes something I’ve seen for years: people think a disclaimer that effectively says “I’m infringing but I’m doing it with the best of intentions” makes a difference. It doesn’t.
- So this is what that Xerox Star GUI interface looked like. You know, the ‘first’ desktop GUI. (via) Also, there was some advanced stuff in 1968.
- I like this indicator light setup. (also via luxh on EFNet #dragonflybsd) There’s some other interesting old computer stuff at that site too. I wish there still were computers like these.
- While we’re talking about old things with a certain feel to them, why not Battersea Power Station? Here’s some pictures. (via)
Your unrelated link of the day: Since we’re talking about old things and environments, why not look at some pictures of my workplace?
Two tips for working with pkgsrc, derived in part from this mailing list post on users@ (follow the thread) and from my own experience. If you put WRKOBJDIR=/usr/obj/pkgsrc into /usr/pkg/etc/mk.conf :
- You can clean up any leftover package building files by deleting the files in that directory and leave your pkgsrc files untouched.
- You can have a read-only /usr/pkgsrc, which means it can be shared over NFS (or SMB?) between multiple machines, DragonFly or otherwise.
I’ve had a bunch of posts like this so far, but that’s not a bad thing. Sepherosa Ziehau has a pair of optimizations that appear to make performance with big pipes (1G) and tiny packets (18b, if I read correctly) reach near the physical maximum for 1000-base-T Ethernet.
I think a lot of people don’t realize rcrun exists, and run files in /etc/rc.d directly. If you’re one of those people, read the rcrun(8) manpage. Then, notice that Sascha Wildner has extended rcrun to work with the etc/rc.d in /usr/local and /usr/pkg too.
Francois Tigeot has been working for quite a while on a VFS accounting system. It doesn’t restrict to a quota (yet), but it will give you byte totals for each mounted filesystem. It has been committed, so it looks like a good way to tell which PFS is eating your disk.
Update: Francois pointed out he’s still adding parts for this. So it’s not quite done yet, but soon.
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; make all install cd /usr/src/bin/mkdir make clean; make obj; make all install
It’ll also use more memory than a non-parallel build, but heck, that’s cheap these days.
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.
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 message has numbers to back that up.
Adrian Chadd showed up on the DragonFly kernel@ mailing list, offering some help in keeping things compatible with FreeBSD and 802.11 networking. That’s quite neighborly of him, especially since his hands are already pretty full.
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.