Google’s running the Code-In project again for 2011, where open source projects mentor 13-17-year-olds on a variety of small projects. DragonFly participated last year and had lots of good work done. However, we need ideas, the more the better. Please add whatever comes to mind.
There’s a rare crash in DragonFly 2.10, where applications would segfault. The system would run find. This is apparently more likely to happen in 2.12, though reports on this vary. It’s real, though.
Matthew Dillon went looking for this bug, and happened to roll back vm_token, the last lock in DragonFly that presented a serious impediment to multiprocessing. It’s a big patch. It fixes the problem, which is great! It also happens to make DragonFly buildworlds almost twice as fast depending on the number of cores in the system.
Holy crap we want to get that out… but it makes some significant changes to the system and needs to be tested. So, the next release probably won’t be for a few weeks.
If you want to help, build master and do something with it – move data, run server programs, whatever. Report crashes. This performance improvement is worth working for.
I didn’t know this existed, but there it is: the BSD Router Project is a software router, which just reached version 1.0. (via)
They aren’t really release candidates per se, just “images I built from the 2.12 branch”, but they are available for testing.
There’s only two commits, already in DragonFly-current, to add to 2.12 before it’s clear of all listed release requirements. And maybe binary package builds… which I’m about 2/3 of the way through.
Dennis Ritchie, one of the people behind UNIX and the C language, has died. (via skullY on #dragonflybsd on EFNet) Look at his Bell Labs web page for some details on his history. The death of Steve Jobs will get a lot of media attention, but I’d argue that Ritchie affected more computers in far more ways.
Among other changes to pkgin 0.5 (available in pkgsrc-wip but not pkgsrc-2011Q3), it now notices if you need a newer pkg_install because you’ve shifted to a more recent quarterly release of pkgsrc, and grabs the appropriate binary package to fix that. Thanks, iMil!
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.
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 it’s looking good already. Keep in mind these are improvements on top of the performance graphed here yesterday.
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, here’s a cheesy overlay, cropping the more recent results and laying the old ones on top of it. The black lines are the year-ago performance, and the colored lines are the performance now.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.)
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.
Want to create getcontext for DragonFly/x86_64? Apparently we need it.
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.
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!