Re: my mail

[News User]

[Ooops, sorry for forgetting to pass a Subject header to sendmail..., and
the bogus envelope sender]
   
David O'Brien went a little something like this:

 On Wed, Nov 29, 2000 at 08:06:14AM +0100, News User wrote:
  I'm building news machines with two partitions for OSen, to allow
  me to boot into my choice, where my choice has been FreeBSD-STABLE
  or FreeBSD-CURRENT
  I know, ``don't do that'' but hey...
 
 Except for stupidity in libdisk(I believe) and thus sysinstall, there is
 no, none, zero reason why one cannot have two installations of FreeBSD in
 two different slices on the same disk.

Erm, actually, what I meant by the ``don't do that'' was referring
to the idea of using -CURRENT, especially SMPNG current with known
problems, on a production machine.  But it's my butt on the line.

Anyway, I'm surprised to hear that other people have had problems.
It's routine for me to put at least two FreeBSDen on any disk I
build larger than 2GB, and I've never had problems with the two of
them co-existing, or adding yet another OS like NetBSD for further
instructive comparisons.  Good way to put that extra unused space
to use, and to make it easy to choose the desired OS and upgrade
without risk.

There have been a small number of times when sysinstall has complained
that I can't have a root partition where I put it the second time,
but not too often, and I've been able to work around it.  The only
recent difficulty I've had has been when I built an OS on a disk
whose geometry was not the usual translated x/255/63 and the install
procedure and all utilities recognized the different geometry, but
the boot mangler failed to boot the OS partition.  I fixed this by
just booting into an older OS on a different disk and writing from
that sysinstall to the boot sector of the problem disk, and now it
boots fine.  I've had a few other geometry-related problems when
attempting to do 4.x installations, but I haven't bothered to try
to dig around for the root cause and repeatable conditions...


now i'll just go away
barry bouwsma



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No Subject

[News User]

Here's a report, that you may ignore if needed...

I'm building news machines with two partitions for OSen, to allow
me to boot into my choice, where my choice has been FreeBSD-STABLE
or FreeBSD-CURRENT to see how the two compare, and if there are any
significant improvements in -CURRENT.

I know, ``don't do that'' but hey...

Anyway, using the performance with -STABLE as a reference on this
system with currently a single CPU, I built a freshly cvsup'ed
-CURRENT just under 24 hours ago and then ran it in production for
about ten hours before reverting back to -STABLE.

First of all, after building a custom kernel and mounting several
disks with softupdates, I then gave a command to cp -pR /news/dir
to /news/FreeBSD-STABLE-dir , where the /news disk is mounted with
both softupdates and noatime.

Quickly I got a  panic: ffs_valloc: dup alloc  and everything froze
solid.  I didn't attempt to repeat this to see if it is repeatable.
I disabled the softupdates, remounted the disk (just noatime) and
again gave the cp -pR command, which succeesed.  In fact, for the
next ten hours, I attempted to pump a full newsfeed through this
machine with no problems and stable operation.

A few other drives are mounted with both noatime and softupdates,
but without the file creation activity one gets with the command
I gave.  Also, I was sort of running low on inodes, although I never
actually ran out, if that would make any difference.


Now, as far as performance goes, after running for ten hours and
getting a feel for how well it was doing, I rebooted back into
-STABLE and restarted things.  However, I see a huge performance
increase with -STABLE compared to -CURRENT.  That is, I'm able to
take in many more times the number of articles with -STABLE than
the machine running -CURRENT could handle.  Like by a factor of ten.
Basically, apart from the current/stable switch, the machine is
identical in both OSen, and there shoulr be no difference in the
news software proper.  The kernel configs should be comparable too.

Yeah, I know, -current is in a state of transition, but I didn't
expect its performance to be quite *this* bad...


These are just some observations, in the hope they might be useful.

thanks,
barry bouwsma, putting hardware to waste since 1997
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