Joseph Scott’s Blog

FreeBSD 7.0 is finally released. For an over view of what’s new check out the release announcement. This was a long time coming, I look forward to giving it a spin.

Last month Kris Kennaway spoke about FreeBSD 7 (pdf). Lots of details about how FreeBSD 7 came about and what you can expect to see when 7.0 finally gets released.

Perhaps the most interesting part though was the SMP focused case study involving MySQL and PostgreSQL on pages 10 through 19. The numbers for 7.0 compared to previous versions of FreeBSD on transactions per second on multi-CPU systems is really impressive. The ULE scheduler gives a huge boost over the traditional 4BSD scheduler. Looks like ULE will become the default scheduler sometime during the 7.x life time (7.1 perhaps?). You want to see CPUs really put to use? Check out page 13.

I was rather surprised to see the MySQL numbers come in so much lower than the PostgreSQL numbers. There seems to be a MySQL specific problem that limits how well it can scale across multiple CPUs.

Earlier this week I came across Robert Watson’s page on Porting WWIV 4.23 to FreeBSD. I immediately had flashbacks of my BBS days from years ago.

It’s hard to imagine that in the 80s and early 90s just about the only way I had access to email and message boards was through BBSs. Made some good friends from all that time spent on BBSs (hi Jay!). Staying up all night writing WWIV mods in C using Turbo C (I had the C/C++ version) from Borland. I recall Turbo C fitting on three 3 1/2 inch floppy disks. That included their editor application as well.

In some ways blogs and forums have become the web versions of what BBSs where back then. Now I just need to write a plugin for WordPress to support doors, then I could run Trade Wars on my blog!

• Box.net Technical Blog | Blog Archive | How to Debug PHP with Vim and XDebug on Linux – Debugging PHP from Vim. Nice.
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• Porting WWIV 4.23 to FreeBSD UNIX – Now that is old school hacking!
  Tags: wwiv bbs freebsd

• JavaScript-based Amazon Web Services Simple Monthly Calculator – Quick way to determine how much it will cost you to use Amazon services (S3, EC2, etc).
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The FreeBSD Foundation has arranged to auction off the first copy of Absolute FreeBSD, 2nd Edition by Michael Lucas. The proceeds of the auction will go to the foundation:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=120175384688&ssPageName=ADME:L:LCA:US:1123.

I didn’t see this mentioned on the foundation web site yet, so here is a link to the email announcement of the auction.

BSDTalk posted an interview with Greg Lehey (a.k.a. Grog) this morning. Greg has a long history in the unix world and has contributed a fair bit to FreeBSD over the years.

I knew that he had worked for Linuxcare during the dot.com boom, but I didn’t realize that he now works for MySQL (and has for almost a year).

Greg is a very intelligent guy, even if he does use emacs :-)

Christian Zander sent an email to the FreeBSD-Hackers list detailing NVIDIA FreeBSD kernel feature requests. Having high quality video drivers is a very good thing:

NVIDIA has been looking at ways to improve its graphics driver for the
FreeBSD i386 platform, as well as investigating the possibility of adding
support for the FreeBSD amd64 platform, and identified a number of
obstacles. Some progress has been made to resolve them, and NVIDIA would
like to summarize the current status. We would also like to thank John
Baldwin and Doug Rabson for their valuable help.

This summary makes an attempt to describe the kernel interfaces needed by
the NVIDIA FreeBSD i386 graphics driver to achieve feature parity with
the Linux/Solaris graphics drivers, and/or required to make support for
the FreeBSD amd64 platform feasible. It also describes some of the
technical difficulties encountered by NVIDIA during the FreeBSD i386
graphics driver’s development, how these problems have been worked around
and what could be done to solve them better.

UPDATE Thu 13 Jul 2006 @ 2:30pm : BSDTalk has an interview with Andy Ritger and Christian Zander from nVidia.

Jeff Bonwick pointed out that ZFS is going to be ported to FUSE (filesystem in user space). This is being done as part of the Google Summer of Code by Ricardo Manuel da Silva Correia.

For more info check out the Google SoC application and the ZFS on FUSE/Linux Blog. Although this project specifically mentions FUSE on Linux I hope that it will work with FUSE for FreeBSD.

I don’t know what sort of performance penalty is involved with FUSE, but it would be darn cool to have this work with FreeBSD.

Colin Percival posted a message to the FreeBSD-stable email list looking for FreeBSD sysadmins to take a security survey. So if you are responsible for keeping a FreeBSD running take a moment to take the survey.

On Monday FreeBSD released 6.1. For the details on what is new since 6.0 check out the release notes for your platform. Now that 6.1 is out I look forward to pfSense hitting their 1.0 release. I’m sure that I could come up with an excuse to try out pfSense once they are out of beta :-)