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.
It looks like Sepherosa Ziehau is working on hardware support being split up per-CPU, judging by this commit – one of many, recently.
Tim Bisson’s work on TRIM support has been committed. I don’t know if it will show in 2.12, but it’s off by default so it would seem a safe move.
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.
Did you notice zgrep went missing? Well, it’s available again, thanks to YONETANI Tomokazu.
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.
This week’s Lazy Reading just built itself up quickly; autumn arrives in the northern hemisphere and suddenly a lot more activity starts going on.
- 9vx, Plan 9 as a user process. (sorta like a vkernel?) Via Sascha Wildner on IRC.
- Found at the same location: You are not expected to understand this.
- Michael W. Lucas, sometime BSD author, has 3 short horror stories available for free, for a limited time. Be warned; there’s no BSD in these stories, as far as I can tell. In fact, they contain genuine horror, not “and then… the server ran Windows ME!” kind of nerd horror.
- Also from Mr. Lucas, it’s always nice to see DragonFly hit production.
- A nice explanation of the recent TLS vulnerability. (via)
- Chumby creator Bunnie Huang’s look at future hardware is optimistic, but I like it. If nothing else, it implies easier driver support. If that names seems familier, Bunnie’s MicroSD saga was previously linked here. (via)
- This short Overcoming Bias post is about nanotech, but a certain sentence in there struck me as a good way to determine how you plan out your computer infrastructure (via):
There are four ways to deal with system damage: 1) reliability, 2) redundancy, 3) repair, and 4) replacement.
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!
Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSH to version 5.9p1. This might be the last thing before the next DragonFly release.
Update on the update: he updated OpenSSL (1.0.0e) and file (5.09) too.
Francois Tigeot has done another set of benchmarks using blogbench to test reading and writing under different DragonFly versions, plus some OpenIndiana benchmarks just to mix it up. Writing performance seems to have drastically improved between DragonFly 2.10 and 2.11.
His post has an attached PDF with, of course, graphs. This site has previously mentioned other not-really-comparable disk testing performed by Francois.
I might have a job open at my workplace soon, for a junior admin/support/network role. (Department is too small for narrowly defined roles…) I’ll post about it here if it happens.
- libguestfs, ‘tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images’. (via) I can think of a lot of places that could be useful.
- I did not know this, but FreshBSD tracks DragonFly commits, along with the commit logs of most (all?) other BSDs.
- Bruce Perens set up a “Covenant” license for the HPCC database (powers Lexis/Nexis) that is actually pretty good at allowing something to be both open source and commerical; the ‘release notes‘ talk about it.
- I agree with these sentiments on hiring exactly. If you really like what you do, you don’t just do it at work. (The author’s followup.) Putting it in a more positive light, showing work on open source, outside of your workplace, is a great thing to add to your resume. Never trust the graphic designer with sloppy handwriting.
- The majority of the 10 most stable web providers out there are running a BSD. FreeBSD, in this case. (via, via) (why does Twitter make it so hard to link to things? Cause they don’t want you reading the web – just them.)
- Usenet, as of 1981, with posts arriving in actual time (-30 years). (via) You can even use a NNTP reader to connect. Similar to but not as colossal as telehack, mentioned here before.
- DragonFly deployment.
- I am so proud of myself for coming up with this joke.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. It used to mostly be violent and nonsensical, but recent strips are excellent, like this one or this.
I proposed some changes to the way DragonFly does releases, and how we handle pkgsrc binary builds. The thread on kernel@ is a bit long, so just read my summation. My idea for a longer release cycle didn’t really fly, but pkgsrc binaries will be built on a rolling basis, I think.