DragonFly BSD Digest » Committed Code

Rough network queues added

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 01:04:03 +0000

Sepherosa Ziehau has added a sort of queuing to altq, where TCP ACKs get higher priority. You may have seen this in any number of pf configurations, where returning data is given its own queue to keep high-volume transfers from slowing themselves down because the acknowledgements can’t get back to the sender. His commit has statistics on the performance improvement. He also added a ‘netrate‘ tool for calculating results from using netperf.

Symbol versioning coming in, also buildworld

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 01:02:24 +0000

If you’re using DragonFly 3.5, your next update should be a full buildworld. That’s because John Marino is adding the framework for symbol versioning. This means that individual library (.so) files will internally keep track of newer and older symbols. The current behavior is to name the files differently, which can cause problems if an expected, linked file is missing – even if the needed symbols are present. The basic framework is being added now, and will be turned on all at once, to minimize the number of times that full buildworld is needed.

Old amd64 removed and extra upgrade step added

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 00:27:52 +0000

The ‘amd64′ specific parts of kernel architecture have been removed, since x86_64 covers all that. As a side effect of other changes, John Marino warns that upgrading DragonFly from a version older than 3.4, to a version newer than 3.4, will require an intermediate step of going to 3.4 first. e.g. If your machine is a DragonFly 3.0 system, you will need to upgrade to 3.4 before moving to, say, 3.6 once it is out. This won’t matter for some months, since the next release is months off.

SO_REUSEPORT turned on

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 24 May 2013 02:25:19 +0000

SO_REUSEPORT has been added and turned on by Sepherosa Ziehau. This is an implementation of a feature found in the Linux kernel. Check the very lengthy commit message for a description of what it does.

More updates

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 15 May 2013 00:44:50 +0000

This time it’s less and libedit, updated by John Marino.

Updates for libmpfd, grep, diff, and libbsdxml

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 23:59:07 +0000

John Marino has committed updates for libmpfr, diff utils, grep, and libexpat/libbsdxml. Libmpfr, the one item that I suspect doesn’t spring instantly to mind, is a library for floating-point computation.

ftp (tnftp) update

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 01:29:02 +0000

Peter Avalos has updated ftp in DragonFly. It’s actually tnftp, which is the same base ftp client used in FreeBSD/NetBSD/Mac OS X/etc. It’s the 20121224 version, and the 3.4 release branch has it too.

A new OpenBSD identd

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 01:00:29 +0000

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.

Another sh(1) update

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 22:46:03 +0000

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.

3 very different commits

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 04:17:15 +0000

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.

Read shortcut, buffer cache improvements

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 01:21:03 +0000

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.

World backups when upgrading

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 21:20:13 +0000

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.

Per-CPU network stats

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 19:37:53 +0000

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…

Updates: OpenSSL, libdialog, tzsetup, locale

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 19:35:11 +0000

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.

Comings and goings

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 22:53:41 +0000

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.

Multiple TX queue support for emx(4), sort of

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 23:12:59 +0000

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.

GCC 4.7 the new default

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 00:43:48 +0000

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 4.7 for DragonFly 3.4?

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 19:25:38 +0000

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.

Network fairness changes and what they mean

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 01:48:47 +0000

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.

Updates for m4 and flex

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 02:39:25 +0000

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.