As part of his NVMe work, Matthew Dillon found I/O speed so fast that CRC checking actually got in the way of disk activity. He’s brought in a new CRC algorithm called xxHash. He also brought in Mark Adler’s hardware iscsi_crc32 implementation, but did not add it to Hammer2. There’s some work on read-ahead operations too, to deal with the NVMe throughput.
Remember how DragonFly now has autofs? That obsoletes amd, amq, and so on, in the am-utils suite. Now, am-utils has been removed. This may affect nobody, as am-utils wasn’t working well.
The South East Linux Fest is starting tomorrow, and there will be a BSD presence (booth and talks) there – PC-BSD. Stop by if you are the Charlotte, NC area.
(I’d normally save this for In Other BSDs but the event would be half-done by then.)
Remember Sepherosa Ziehau’s nginx tests on DragonFly? He’s using the same configuration to test performance of the accept(2) and close(2) calls. The result? Over 8000 concurrent connections, for 580,000 connections per second. That’s on one DragonFly machine.
Tomohiro Kusumi has finished his port of autofs to DragonFly; you can now have a filesystem automatically mount when accessed, rather than requiring it at boot.
If you are running DragonFly in a virtual environment, there’s been some improvements to virtio(4). Update and try if you’ve had problems in the past.
Sepherosa Ziehau has been working on network performance, including making more network calls asynchronous. His test case using nginx shows that a single DragonFly machine can now take enough traffic to max out 2 10Gb links. That’s with 16Kb requests, and 30,000 of them at the same time.
If you happen to be testing kernel modules, DragonFly can now load them from a modules.local directory. This keeps modules that aren’t part of the base system, separate. This is probably of most use to developers. It’s controlled by local_modules being set in /boot/loader.conf, and defaults to on.
(Updated for correct file location – thanks, swildner)
If you’re using qemu and DragonFly, the latest update of ACPICA to version 20160422 may fix some issues introduced in a previous update. (I don’t have a specific bug report to point you at; sorry!)
Tomohiro Kusumi has been creating a near-constant stream of bugfixes and cleanups to Hammer for quite some time. I don’t often link to it, because they are incremental improvements and hard to linkblog, so to speak. In an effort to make up for this deficit, I do want to draw attention to his two recent commits: “Make hammer commands print root volume path“, and “Print volume list after volume-add|del“. Small changes, but this is what makes complex systems usable.
I keep posting about Sepherosa Ziehau’s work on sustaining extremely high traffic loads in DragonFly. Now I’m posting about a tool to create that load: kq_sendrecv. It creates tens of thousands of TCP connections, without creating a process for each, and uses kqueue, as you might guess from the name. This may be useful if you really want to tax another system.
unzip has been added to DragonFly, making it present in every BSD but I think OpenBSD.
Imre Vadasz has added the ability to create a UEFI bootloader in DragonFly. Can you use it? I don’t know; I haven’t tried it yet and I can’t tell from the commit.
John Marino has added the starting framework to use clang as the alternate base compiler in DragonFly. Note that it’s not hooked into the build yet. This is the first non-GCC compiler added into DragonFly, so there’s some work yet before you can have an all-clang system. This should replace GCC 4.7, which is the current alternate compiler. GCC 5.0 is the default, if you didn’t know.
Note that clang is present in dports, so it’s already been available for general use, for some time. This framework is for building DragonFly itself.
If you are running bleeding-edge DragonFly, Sepherosa Ziehau has made some networking changes that both reduce CPU usage in high-traffic situations and change some underlying network structures. This means a full buildworld is needed on your next update.
If you’re using DragonFly 4.4.x or older, you are unaffected.
Sepherosa Ziehau has continued his quest of making large-scale data transmission on DragonFly effortless; his latest change has cut the kqueue contention rate by two-thirds when dealing with a connection rate of nearly 400,000 connections per second. Note that’s number of connections, without even tracking the bandwidth used by each.
Bill Yuan has added ‘ipfwsync’ to ipfw3 in DragonFly. As you may expect from the name, it’s a way to sync ipfw3 configurations across multiple devices.
Welcome the newest DragonFly committer: Bill Yuan. His ipfw3 work has been going on for a while.
If you have a Broadwell system, the drm.i915.enable_execlists tunable added by Imre Vadász may keep your system stable. (thanks, zach on EFNet #dragonflybsd)