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.
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
I mentioned this before, but there’s now an official announcement that pkgsrc is (now, after the 2011Q1 release) going to DESTDIR support and what that means.
This alphabet soup of acronyms is what Matthew Dillon updated, leading to some significant performance improvements for drives that use NCQ tagging. Try it out cause it’s fast, and try it out because it needs testers; this is a change that affects some basic parts of how data is written to disk, and you don’t want to get that wrong…
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.
Sascha Wildner has moved gcc in DragonFly to a slightly newer version: 4.4.5. It mostly seems to make things easier to compile, going by the reports I’ve heard. This is the version that will be in DragonFly 2.10.
It’s Dragonfly, and it sounds very similar to swapcache(8). Coincidence? Maybe. (via bodie on EFNet #dragonfly IRC)
Getting into the swing of this link collection thing…
- The first paragraph of this things magazine post is about the “lingering memory of the space of ancient video games.” It’s good; follow the links to read. It also mentions the excellent This Gaming Life book, which is on the shelf to the right of me as I type, and can be read in full online. (though it’s worth buying.)
- This made me laugh.
- How to kill your online community. Good guidelines for how to (not) act.
- This week’s “Only the Internet could produce this”: Einstein vs. Hawking, the rap battle.
- pcc is now at version 1.0.
- Anyone have recommendations for a good domain registrar? I’m sick of mine.
There’s a number of pkgsrc packages that have a combination of security vulnerabilites and lack of updates for more than a year which is placing them on the chopping block. (Follow the discussion to see which ones make it off the list.) The removals will happen after the next branch, pkgsrc-2011Q1, which is itself due in two days.
If you’re running the bleeding edge version of DragonFly, because Sepherosa Ziehau’s recent work makes it possible to boot systems that were previously bootable, you may need this sysctl trick loader tunable in loader.conf:
debug.acpi.enabled="pci pci_link"
How will you know that you need it? The system will run strangely slow. The command enables ACPI interrupt routing, which corrects for mptable problems.
pf in DragonFly 2.9 is currently equivalent to OpenBSD’s 4.4 version. This is probably what will be in the next release version of DragonFly, as Jan Lentfer, the man responsible for the rapid, recent pf upgrades, is a new father (again). Congratulations on the new daughter, Jan!
I had linked to this before during Summer of Code 2010 before it completed, but an ongoing discussion on the kernel@ mailing list for DragonFly reminded me: a student named Naohiro Aota put together a Gentoo/DragonFly system for SoC 2010, similar to the existing Gentoo/FreeBSD project. He’s interested in working directly with DragonFly, now.
John Marino’s work on getting support for DragonFly ‘natively’ into binutils, upstream, has been successful. Thanks, John!
I’ve found enough good links I’m able to schedule this post ahead of time. Yay!
- Michael Lucas, BSD book author, is selling a short story via Amazon/Kindle. It has nothing to do with BSD, directly.
- Also, he offers beer to anyone who can get KVM working on a BSD. Any BSD. I guess vkernels don’t count, really.
- This idea came up at work recently: Etherkiller!
- The evolution of computer displays. (via) It covers some pretty ancient stuff – the article doesn’t even get to Pong until page 3.
- A paper on the new PBI format for PC-BSD (PDF). This is being presented at AsiaBSDCon.
- The Dancing Poultry License (via ftigeot on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- A chart of the evolution of science fiction. (via) There’s some good titles in there, if you can read it.
As already mentioned on this Digest, the freeze for the next quarterly release of pkgsrc, pkgsrc-2011Q1, has started. I’ve also completed several bulk builds of pkgsrc-2010Q4 and pkgsrc-current using DragonFly system with GCC 4.4. Francois Tigeot has very kindly gone out of his way to get some of the (relatively few) broken packages listed in those builds to be fixed.
As noted in announcements, pkgsrc is entering a 10-day freeze period starting tomorrow. If everything goes to plan, the next quarterly release of pkgsrc, 2011Q1, will be released April 3rd.
There’s a DragonFly BSD group on identi.ca, the not-as-creepy-as-Facebook social site.