Merry X-Mas and 3.0 release after the holidays - date not yet decided
Hello everyone! First, I apologize for the aborted 2.12 release. We got as far as rolling it but I decided to make a real push to try to fix the occassional random seg-fault bug that we were still seeing on 64-bit at the time. The seg-fault issue has now been resolved, I posted an exhaustive synopsis to the kernel@ list just a moment ago. Basically it appears to be an AMD cpu bug and not a DragonFly bug. We don't have final confirmation that it isn't a DragonFly bug because it is so sensitive to %rip and %rsp values that reproducing the environment to test it on other OSs (even FreeBSD) is difficult, but I'm 99% certain it's an AMD bug. Add a single NOP instruction to the end of one routine in the gcc-4.4 codebase appears to work around the bug. So moving on to rolling an official release... (1) Through past experience we will NOT do a release during the holidays! So everyone please enjoy Christmas and New Years! (2) I would like to call the release 3.0. Why? Because while spending the last ~1-2 months tracking down the cpu bug a whole lot of other work has gone into the kernel including major network protocol stack work and major SMP work. My contribution to the SMP work was to completely rewrite the 64-bit pmap, VM object handling code, and VM fault handling code, as well as some other stuff. This has resulted in a phenominal improvement in concurrency and in particular concurrent compilations or anything that takes a lot of page faults. SMP contention was completely removed from the page fault path and for most VM related operations, and almost completely removed from the exec*() path. Other related work has continued to improve mysql and postgresql numbers as well. (3) Release date is as-yet undecided. It will probably be mid-February to end-February in order to synchronize with the pkgsrc 2011-Q4 release and give things time to settle. The release meisters will be discussing it on IRC. I will say that there are NO serious showstoppers this time. I'd like us to take our time and make this the best release we've ever done! -Matt
Re: Merry X-Mas and 3.0 release after the holidays - date not yet decided
Not that my voice has any weight, but I applaud and welcome a 3.0 release. :) -Toby. On Sun, Dec 25, 2011 at 4:01 PM, Matthew Dillon dil...@apollo.backplane.com wrote: Hello everyone! First, I apologize for the aborted 2.12 release. We got as far as rolling it but I decided to make a real push to try to fix the occassional random seg-fault bug that we were still seeing on 64-bit at the time. The seg-fault issue has now been resolved, I posted an exhaustive synopsis to the kernel@ list just a moment ago. Basically it appears to be an AMD cpu bug and not a DragonFly bug. We don't have final confirmation that it isn't a DragonFly bug because it is so sensitive to %rip and %rsp values that reproducing the environment to test it on other OSs (even FreeBSD) is difficult, but I'm 99% certain it's an AMD bug. Add a single NOP instruction to the end of one routine in the gcc-4.4 codebase appears to work around the bug. So moving on to rolling an official release... (1) Through past experience we will NOT do a release during the holidays! So everyone please enjoy Christmas and New Years! (2) I would like to call the release 3.0. Why? Because while spending the last ~1-2 months tracking down the cpu bug a whole lot of other work has gone into the kernel including major network protocol stack work and major SMP work. My contribution to the SMP work was to completely rewrite the 64-bit pmap, VM object handling code, and VM fault handling code, as well as some other stuff. This has resulted in a phenominal improvement in concurrency and in particular concurrent compilations or anything that takes a lot of page faults. SMP contention was completely removed from the page fault path and for most VM related operations, and almost completely removed from the exec*() path. Other related work has continued to improve mysql and postgresql numbers as well. (3) Release date is as-yet undecided. It will probably be mid-February to end-February in order to synchronize with the pkgsrc 2011-Q4 release and give things time to settle. The release meisters will be discussing it on IRC. I will say that there are NO serious showstoppers this time. I'd like us to take our time and make this the best release we've ever done! -Matt
Re: Merry X-Mas and 3.0 release after the holidays - date not yet decided
On Sun, Dec 25, 2011 at 6:01 PM, Matthew Dillon dil...@apollo.backplane.com wrote: Hello everyone! First, I apologize for the aborted 2.12 release. We got as far as rolling it but I decided to make a real push to try to fix the occassional random seg-fault bug that we were still seeing on 64-bit at the time. The 2011Q4 release is due out in 6 days, so we've got a nice time window for releasing. As for 3.0, as Samuel says, it would be be nice to have a new technology to talk up with the version number. I like all the changes since the 2.10 release, but they are hard to quantify in a user-apparent way. The question that I think follows is: how soon can we have a (even marked as dangerously beta) Hammer 2 or something similar? 2.0 had Hammer, so it would be nice to have 3.0 with Hammer 2, even with big warning stickers all over it. If it's 9 months out, then there's no point in waiting that long. I realize I'm volunteering other people's schedules by asking that.
