Re: Installation on Macbook Pro
Christopher Rawnsley wrote: On 9 Mar 2008, at 21:10, Bill Hacker wrote: I would actually recommend an external HDD on FW-800 or USB2. I don't have one of those handy at the moment so I think I'll keep on trying without for the moment. Apple marches to the beat of a whole different orchestra w/r disk layout labels, so I had to do that to get FreeBSD/PPC or OpenBSD/PPC up on my G4 PowerBook 17. Ah maybe but I like to try none-the-less :) And I don't use hfs at all - not even for OS X. Mind me asking what you use and why? Apple's UFS. Not fully compatible with 'real' UFS, but: - gives me consistent directory structure, file handling and case-sensitivity across the PowerBook and the *BSD *n*x servers I work with all day. - makes it easier to keep 'Finder' like stuff from defecating in the machinery. - which - along with a few other tweaks, lets a 1 GHz G4 perform really well with 12 'desktops', yet w/o having to listen to its raspy variable-speed cooling fan unless the room is over 24 C or so. DFLY - or any *BSD - needs only a fraction of the resources even a cleand-up and stripped-down OS X consumes. Well I don't have any problems with it. Runs lovely and smooth. Of course, I would like to get DragonFly running like that too. -- Chris Not knocking it 'as shipped'. But the tweaks above - and a higher-RPM replacement HDD - have extended the useful life of the G4 by several years already. The replacement may well be a few more years out - and maybe ARM RISC based or such as this beast is quite heavy once in the Halliburton case it needs to stay healthy at 50 to 75 thousand air miles a year. Other than the above tweaks, I keep the PowerBook as a 'don't f**k with' appliance as all but one other machine within reach (seldom fewer than half a dozen) is constantly being reconfigured. Some host a full dozen OS or variants on one box. Too easy to lose track of stuff without an 'appliance' as sanity-anchor. or attempted one, anyway .. ;-) Bill
Re: FreeBSD 7, DragonFly's status
On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 9:37 AM, Kris Kennaway [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Bill Hacker wrote: Kris, w/r the http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/mysql.html page The link to the MySQL config: http://www.freebsd.org/%7Ekris/scaling/my.cnf ...gives me a 404. Thanks, fixed. I don't have even a Quad-core I can spare from duty at the moment, but I'd like to at least see what the relative UMP dual-core results are on one of the OpenSolaris releases we have handy. Solaris-on-x86 subjectively seems relatively faster now than 'SlowLaris' days, but still no great shakes speed-wise. I don't know how well UP will perform, but Solaris have put enormous amounts of work into their SMP implementation. One thing we found in FreeBSD is that SMP optimization work often also ends up improving UP performance at the same time, so the results may be surprising. I hope to rerun my benchmarks on an 8-core system soon (the trick has been getting Solaris netbooted). Hi Kris, Do you think you'd have a chance to load up Windows Server on the same machine and compare its MySQL and PostgreSQL to modern Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris? That's probably asking a lot, but I'm sure I'm not the only person interested in seeing how Windows' latest kernels perform for server roles. I just hope that, in such a benchmark, the userland software implementation is fair to the platform, and not degenerating to low-performance APIs from lack of optimisation. There's a lot of debate about the use of FreeBSD and Linux and others for servers, and personally I'm just happy to have so much choice available to optimise per project. But it'd be really great to know where Windows fits in the performance competition, and it's nice to have some numbers to point to when arguing that free operating systems outperform proprietary ones. -- Dmitri Nikulin Centre for Synchrotron Science Monash University Victoria 3800, Australia
Re: FreeBSD 7, DragonFly's status
Dmitri Nikulin wrote: Hi Kris, Do you think you'd have a chance to load up Windows Server on the same machine and compare its MySQL and PostgreSQL to modern Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris? I dont think there's much chance of that, sorry. I dont have access to a copy, the test machines are remotely hosted, and I doubt windows server can be booted over pxe :) I'd need someone to provide me with access to their own machine running those OSes. Kris
Re: FreeBSD 7, DragonFly's status
Dmitri Nikulin wrote: Hi Kris, Do you think you'd have a chance to load up Windows Server on the same machine and compare its MySQL and PostgreSQL to modern Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris? I dont think there's much chance of that, sorry. I dont have access to a copy, the test machines are remotely hosted, and I doubt windows server can be booted over pxe :) I'd need someone to provide me with access to their own machine running those OSes. Kris
Re: FreeBSD 7, DragonFly's status
On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 9:11 PM, Kris Kennaway [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Dmitri Nikulin wrote: Hi Kris, Do you think you'd have a chance to load up Windows Server on the same machine and compare its MySQL and PostgreSQL to modern Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris? I dont think there's much chance of that, sorry. I dont have access to a copy, the test machines are remotely hosted, and I doubt windows server can be booted over pxe :) I'd need someone to provide me with access to their own machine running those OSes. I was afraid you'd say that. I'm a pretty average consumer hardware-wise (I like to think I make up for it with software :P) so all I have is an Athlon64 X2 and a portable Core Duo. By the way, jeffr mentions: http://jeffr-tech.livejournal.com/18706.html Next up, we now have a 16 way xeon and 16 way opteron system to tune and test with. More points of contention are being removed. The code marches on. Perhaps future benchmarks can use those systems, though I don't know the exact details of how those machines are provided and their limitations. -- Dmitri Nikulin Centre for Synchrotron Science Monash University Victoria 3800, Australia
Re: Installation on Macbook Pro
On 10 Mar 2008, at 03:46, YONETANI Tomokazu wrote: Last time I tried, it seemed that I managed to smash the partition table when I manually issued the fdisk command. I don't remember if I specified the correct device, but I doubt our fdisk knows about EFI partitions. I'm hoping that it won't matter 'cause the Macbooks appear to preserve the MBR in some form. Anyway, the situation should be improved since then, thanks to sephe@ who has ported msk(4) driver. Yes... Network adapter detected and working correctly :)
Re: Installation on Macbook Pro
On 9 Mar 2008, at 19:22, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote: I suppose this is the same problem I have seen in NetBSD. Basically, some firmware images reenable interrupts when the legacy support is turned off. Fix can be found in NetBSD's UHCI driver. That would wouldn't happen to be related to another problem I am having? When I boot the live disc I get a prompt asking which kernel options I want. Now the keyboard has always worked in this situation. When the live disc has booted, however, the keyboard occasionally works. I have to reboot again and cross my fingers... -- Chris
Re: Installation on Macbook Pro
On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 06:31:20PM +, Christopher Rawnsley wrote: On 9 Mar 2008, at 19:22, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote: I suppose this is the same problem I have seen in NetBSD. Basically, some firmware images reenable interrupts when the legacy support is turned off. Fix can be found in NetBSD's UHCI driver. That would wouldn't happen to be related to another problem I am having? When I boot the live disc I get a prompt asking which kernel options I want. Now the keyboard has always worked in this situation. When the live disc has booted, however, the keyboard occasionally works. I have to reboot again and cross my fingers... That could be an unacknowledged interrupt. Not sure. Joerg
Re: FreeBSD 7, DragonFly's status
Kris Kennaway [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: The assertion is often made by dragonfly project supporters that dragonfly has much better stability than FreeBSD. It is not clear by what metric this is being objectively evaluated (if at all). ... Obviously one panic does not demonstrate wide-ranging system instability, but it does point to a possible selection bias amongst the project supporters, who may not be looking hard enough for the stability problems that exist. The very definition of supporter implicitly contains selection bias. I daresay one cannot be an unbiased supporter and a human being at the same time. Thus what you say here reads to me like a tautology. Pointing to various events is all well and good (e.g. the stress2 panic for DragonFly, unplugging mounted USB storage devices from FreeBSD), and I understand the need for advocacy and challenge among various supporters of projects...but I am keenly interested in some sort of objective metric for stability beyond stress test panics and unfixable bugs. Does an objective metric of stability actually exist? ( If you say uptime I'll take that as a no ;) ) If it does, I would really like to learn what that metric is. Do you know of any current low-project-bias work that has been done in this area? Thanks in advance. :) -- Dave Hayes - Consultant - Altadena CA, USA - [EMAIL PROTECTED] The opinions expressed above are entirely my own Envy devours good deeds, as a fire devours fuel.
Re: FreeBSD 7, DragonFly's status
Dave Hayes wrote: Does an objective metric of stability actually exist? ( If you say uptime I'll take that as a no ;) ) If it does, I would really like to learn what that metric is. Do you know of any current low-project-bias work that has been done in this area? Thanks in advance. :) It's easiest to define stability by lack of instability, i.e. system does not crash no matter what you do to it. The best method I know to evaluate this is by brute force (other techniques like static code analysis and formal model checking can help). You have to try really hard to put the system through all kinds of bizarre contortions in the workloads you care about (which is everything for a general OS developer) until you find something that breaks. Then fix it and try again. You have to put serious effort into it though, because after you fix all the obvious panics that can be reproduced in a few minutes of testing, you end up trying to cause extremely low probability events that can (and do) nevertheless pop up on real systems given the right combination of circumstances. If you don't put in the work, the bugs will usually not get fixed until they crash a user's system and they bother to report the bug. This doesn't always happen, often they just curse you out. Once you can no longer trigger bugs no matter how hard you try (assuming you are achieving good coverage of the system), I think it's reasonable to provisionally award the label of pretty stable to the aspects of the system you have been testing. There will always be more bugs than those you found (especially with particular hardware configurations), but at least you've made a concerted effort to find them. This is basically what stress2 and other tools try to help automate, although it can never replace human-driven QA. It's literally a full time job to do properly. Kris
Re: Installation on Macbook Pro
Another observation I have made; I am trying to install slice /dev/ ad4s3. Now if I run: ls /dev/ad4s* I'll get output for the additional lettered partitions for slices s0, s1 but not anything greater for slices s2 and s3, for instance. Could this be the reason that disklabel is throwing errors? -- Chris
