OpenBSD has a new identd daemon. Is identd used for anything other than verification when connecting to an IRC network? I’ve never seen it in another context.
Peter Avalos has committed another batch of updates to sh(1), from FreeBSD. I was going to comment on how strange it was to see software getting updated so many years later; you’d think everything there was to update for /bin/sh had been done at this point. Digging casually, the oldest bit on sh that I can find is from 1991 – 22 years old. The man page mentions a rewrite in 1989 based on System V Release 4 UNIX, and there were versions of sh all the way back to version 1.
Here’s a trivia question – what’s the oldest Unix utility, and what’s the oldest code still in use? I don’t know the answer.
Here’s 3 recent and different commits to DragonFly that I’m commenting on all at once:
- Peter Avalos upgraded libarchive in DragonFly to 3.1.2, with a note of the changes. An ordinary and appreciated update.
- Sascha Wildner updated the ISO639 file to include the newest update: “Standard Moroccan Tamazight”. There’s no particular utility to that; I just like saying “Standard Moroccan Tamazight” out loud.
- Work on poudriere, the utility for bulk-building DPorts packages, has caused some nice speedups for DragonFly in extremely stressful situations. See one of Matthew Dillon’s recent commits.
I really wish the other BSD projects would include commit lines in the mail message subjects, so it was easier to catch things like these.
The new vm.read_shortcut option has been turned on by default by Matthew Dillon, which should lead to some performance improvements. That improvement has been measured for tmpfs, at least. There’s also some buffer cache improvments that help on x86_64 systems, too.
Update: As Venkatesh Srinivas pointed out, tmpfs also no longer uses the mplock, so it’ll take better advantage of multiple processors.
John Marino proposed a method for backing up world when upgrading, for those rare but catastrophic cases where the installed programs can’t run. After some discussion, he committed an automatic backup method, and there’s a ‘restoreworld’ target to take advantage of it.
The kernel already gets renamed to kernel.old as a backup, if I remember correctly.
As Sepherosa Ziehau mentions in his latest commit, DragonFly now collects IFNET/IFADDR statistics on a per-CPU basis. This makes it more accurate, but may mess with any third-party program that accessed it directly. I don’t know if there’s anything in pkgsrc that does that…
I know OpenSSL in DragonFly was just updated, but Peter Avalos has done it again, bringing it to version 1.01e. I assume this new version is to fix some recently-exposed problems. He also has updated libdialog, which was previously not located in contrib/, as sime third-party software needed a more modern version. As a side effect from that, tzsetup in DragonFly now matches the version in FreeBSD and NetBSD. And, Sascha Wildner has updated the locale files on DragonFly, also to match FreeBSD and NetBSD.
Added: Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSL to version 1.0.1d – see the changelog.
Removed: support for ISA sound cards, by Sascha Wildner. Goodbye sb16; I’ll remember you fondly.
The emx(4) driver now has support for multiple TX queues, but it’s not on by default. There’s scenarios where multiple queues work out with that hardware, but you have to be sure you are actually in the right setup for that first. Check Sepherosa Ziehau’s commit message for the details.
John Marino has set gcc 4.7 as the default compiler in DragonFly. This replaces the previous default of gcc 4.4. The 4.4 version is still available, and while you can set NO_GCC44 to keep it from being built, John’s commit message notes that it’s still useful especially for some ports that don’t work with gcc 4.7.
GCC version 4.7 is already available now in DragonFly 3.2, but it’s not the default compiler. John Marino intends to make it default for the next release. What’s that mean for us? Nothing other than a new compiler, since he’s already fixing related issues.
Sepherosa Ziehau makes commits almost daily to DragonFly’s network infrastructure, but I have a hard time quantifying it into Digest posts in part because it’s often very technical. His most recent commits come with an explanation, however. He has done plenty of work to improve overall transmission speeds in DragonFly, and now he’s working on ‘fairness’. Fair, in this case, means ensuring that packet transmitting and receiving happen without either one monopolizing the connection. In real world terms, this translates to much more constant speeds. His recent commit details what he’s doing and some numbers to prove it.
Remember I said he’s improved speeds? Note that in his example, he’s reaching stable peaks of 981 Mbps. This is on a line that I assume theoretically maxes out at 1000.
Peter Avalos has updated m4 for DragonFly. This will bring us a little more in sync with the other BSDs. Also, John Marino has updated flex, which is apparently 17 years old? Meaning it hasn’t been updated in DragonFly ever, and then not in FreeBSD before that, for a long time. Looking at the timeline on the flex web page appears to match.
Sepherosa Ziehau has added a generic form of support for multiple transmit queues in DragonFly. This means less contention when transmitting. It’s not done; he has drivers to set up and as he said, it’s “step 1 of many“.
If you are on DragonFly 3.3, and you are running a kernel built after January 1st, there’s a bug in the way FP context is handled when the kernel supports AVX. (January 1st is when AVX support was committed.) Matthew Dillon has committed a fix and issued a note to update for everyone.
If you recall, Phoronix recently ran a bunch of benchmarks on DragonFly. One spot that didn’t look good was the “Himeno Poisson Pressure Solver”. I’m no closer to knowing what capability it actually tests other than itself, but Alex Hornung, Matt Dillon, and Venkatesh Srinivas figured out that cache coloring was the missing ingredient. DragonFly now scores the same as Linux.
Tangentially related, this cache coloring is happening in nmalloc, which is now used on 64-bit DragonFly systems. The previous one, dmalloc, had problems in long-running programs.
I’m not sure what IFQ stands for, but Sepherosa Ziehau’s added it. It appears to be based on an idea from Luigi Rizzo called ‘netmap‘. In this case, network packets are grouped together before being placed onto the network interface’s hardware queue. That means better packet per second performance without a corresponding increase in CPU usage, as Sepherosa Ziehau’s report lists, along with needed sysctls.
If you’re running DragonFly 3.3, make sure you perform a full buildworld and buildkernel when you next upgrade. Sascha Wildner is mentioning this as a cautionary note after experiencing issues when using quickkernel, after removing a number of syscalls. Once past that point, it should be safe to go back to quickworld/quickkernel.
Matthew Dillon turned off the machdep.pmap_mmu_optimize sysctl by default, since wider testing has found some bugs. It’s only on by default on DragonFly 3.3 systems, so there’s nothing to do if you’re on 3.2-release. The feature will come back after some bugfixing.