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FreeBSD and DragonflyBSD benchmarks on AMD’s Threadripper, NetBSD 7.2 has been released, optimized out DTrace kernel symbols, stuck UEFI bootloaders, why ed is not a good editor today, tell your BSD story, and more.
##Headlines
The past two weeks I have been delivering a great deal of AMD Threadripper 2990WX benchmarks on Linux as well as some against Windows and Windows Server. But recently I got around to trying out some of the BSD operating systems on this 32-core / 64-thread processor to see how they would run and to see whether they would have similar scaling issues or not like we’ve seen on the Windows side against Linux. In this article are FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD benchmarks with the X399 + 2990WX compared to a few Linux distributions.
###NetBSD 7.2 released
The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 7.2, the second feature update of the NetBSD 7 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements.
The NetBSD 7.2 release is a maintenance release of the netbsd-7 branch, which had it's first major release, NetBSD 7.0 in September 2015. A lot of security features have been added to later NetBSD versions, and for new installations we highly recommend using our latest release, NetBSD 8.0 instead.
Complete source and binaries for NetBSD 7.2 are available for download at many sites around the world. A list of download sites providing FTP, AnonCVS, SUP, and other services may be found at https://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/. We encourage users who wish to install via ISO or USB disk images to download via BitTorrent by using the torrent files supplied in the images area. A list of hashes for the NetBSD 7.2 distribution has been signed with the well-connected PGP key for the NetBSD Security Officer: https://cdn.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/security/hashes/NetBSD-7.2_hashes.asc
##News Roundup
Have you ever had dtrace(1) on FreeBSD fail to list a probe that should exist in the kernel? This is because Clang will optimize-out some functions. The result is ctfconvert(1) will not generate debugging symbols that dtrace(1) uses to identify probes. I have a quick solution to getting those probes visible to dtrace(1).
In my case, I was trying to instrument on ieee80211_ioctl_get80211, whose sister function ieee80211_ioctl_set80211 has a dtrace(1) probe in the generic FreeBSD 11 and 12 kernels. Both functions are located in /usr/src/sys/net80211/ieee80211_ioctl.c.
My first attempt was to add to /etc/make.conf as follows and recompile the kernel.
CFLAGS+=-O0 and -fno-inline-functions
This failed to produce the dtrace(1) probe. Several other attempts failed and I was getting inconsistent compilation results (Is it me or is ieee80211_ioctl.c compiled with different flags if NO_CLEAN=1 is set?). When I manually compiled the object file by copying the compilation line for the object file and adding -O0 -fno-inline-functions, nm(1) on both the object file and kernel demonstrated that the symbol was present. I installed the kernel, rebooted and it was listed as a dtrace probe. Great!
But as I continued to debug my WiFi driver (oh yeah, I’m very slowly extending rtwn(4)), I found myself rebuilding the kernel several times and frequently rebooting. Why not do this across the entire kernel?
After hacking around, my solution was to modify the build scripts. My solution was to edit /usr/src/sys/conf/kern.pre.mk and modify all optimization level 2 to optimization level 0. The following is my diff(1) on FreeBSD 12.0-CURRENT.
This seems like a hack rather than a long-term solution. Either the problem is with the hard-coded optimization flags, or the inability to overwrite them in all places in make.conf.
###FreeBSD: UEFI Bootloader stuck on BootCurrent/BootOrder/BootInfo on Asus Motherboards (and fix!)
Starting with FreeBSD CURRENT from about a few weeks of posting date, but including FreeBSD 12 alpha releases (not related to DEC Alpha), I noticed one thing: When I boot FreeBSD from UEFI on a homebuilt desktop with a Asus H87M-E motherboard, and have Root on ZFS, the bootloader gets stuck on lines like BootCurrent, BootOrder, and BootInfo. This issue occurs when I try to boot directly to efi\boot\bootx64.efi.
One person had a similar issue on a Asus H87I-PLUS motherboard. This issue may or may not exist on other Asus motherboards, desktops, or laptops. This may be specific to Asus motherboards for Intel’s Haswell, but may also exist on newer systems (e.g. Skylake) or older (e.g. Ivy Bridge) with Asus motherboards, as well as Asus desktops or laptops.
Keep in mind that I am not going to talk about this issue and third-party UEFI boot managers such as rEFInd here.
###Why ed(1) is not a good editor today
I’ll start with my tweet:
Heretical Unix opinion time: ed(1) may be the 'standard Unix editor', but it is not a particularly good editor outside of a limited environment that almost never applies today.
There is a certain portion of Unixdom that really likes ed(1), the ‘standard Unix editor’. Having actually used ed for a not insignificant amount of time (although it was the friendlier ‘UofT ed’ variant), I have some reactions to what I feel is sometimes overzealous praise of it. One of these is what I tweeted.
##Beastie Bits
##Feedback/Questions
4.9
8989 ratings
FreeBSD and DragonflyBSD benchmarks on AMD’s Threadripper, NetBSD 7.2 has been released, optimized out DTrace kernel symbols, stuck UEFI bootloaders, why ed is not a good editor today, tell your BSD story, and more.
##Headlines
The past two weeks I have been delivering a great deal of AMD Threadripper 2990WX benchmarks on Linux as well as some against Windows and Windows Server. But recently I got around to trying out some of the BSD operating systems on this 32-core / 64-thread processor to see how they would run and to see whether they would have similar scaling issues or not like we’ve seen on the Windows side against Linux. In this article are FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD benchmarks with the X399 + 2990WX compared to a few Linux distributions.
###NetBSD 7.2 released
The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 7.2, the second feature update of the NetBSD 7 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements.
The NetBSD 7.2 release is a maintenance release of the netbsd-7 branch, which had it's first major release, NetBSD 7.0 in September 2015. A lot of security features have been added to later NetBSD versions, and for new installations we highly recommend using our latest release, NetBSD 8.0 instead.
Complete source and binaries for NetBSD 7.2 are available for download at many sites around the world. A list of download sites providing FTP, AnonCVS, SUP, and other services may be found at https://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/. We encourage users who wish to install via ISO or USB disk images to download via BitTorrent by using the torrent files supplied in the images area. A list of hashes for the NetBSD 7.2 distribution has been signed with the well-connected PGP key for the NetBSD Security Officer: https://cdn.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/security/hashes/NetBSD-7.2_hashes.asc
##News Roundup
Have you ever had dtrace(1) on FreeBSD fail to list a probe that should exist in the kernel? This is because Clang will optimize-out some functions. The result is ctfconvert(1) will not generate debugging symbols that dtrace(1) uses to identify probes. I have a quick solution to getting those probes visible to dtrace(1).
In my case, I was trying to instrument on ieee80211_ioctl_get80211, whose sister function ieee80211_ioctl_set80211 has a dtrace(1) probe in the generic FreeBSD 11 and 12 kernels. Both functions are located in /usr/src/sys/net80211/ieee80211_ioctl.c.
My first attempt was to add to /etc/make.conf as follows and recompile the kernel.
CFLAGS+=-O0 and -fno-inline-functions
This failed to produce the dtrace(1) probe. Several other attempts failed and I was getting inconsistent compilation results (Is it me or is ieee80211_ioctl.c compiled with different flags if NO_CLEAN=1 is set?). When I manually compiled the object file by copying the compilation line for the object file and adding -O0 -fno-inline-functions, nm(1) on both the object file and kernel demonstrated that the symbol was present. I installed the kernel, rebooted and it was listed as a dtrace probe. Great!
But as I continued to debug my WiFi driver (oh yeah, I’m very slowly extending rtwn(4)), I found myself rebuilding the kernel several times and frequently rebooting. Why not do this across the entire kernel?
After hacking around, my solution was to modify the build scripts. My solution was to edit /usr/src/sys/conf/kern.pre.mk and modify all optimization level 2 to optimization level 0. The following is my diff(1) on FreeBSD 12.0-CURRENT.
This seems like a hack rather than a long-term solution. Either the problem is with the hard-coded optimization flags, or the inability to overwrite them in all places in make.conf.
###FreeBSD: UEFI Bootloader stuck on BootCurrent/BootOrder/BootInfo on Asus Motherboards (and fix!)
Starting with FreeBSD CURRENT from about a few weeks of posting date, but including FreeBSD 12 alpha releases (not related to DEC Alpha), I noticed one thing: When I boot FreeBSD from UEFI on a homebuilt desktop with a Asus H87M-E motherboard, and have Root on ZFS, the bootloader gets stuck on lines like BootCurrent, BootOrder, and BootInfo. This issue occurs when I try to boot directly to efi\boot\bootx64.efi.
One person had a similar issue on a Asus H87I-PLUS motherboard. This issue may or may not exist on other Asus motherboards, desktops, or laptops. This may be specific to Asus motherboards for Intel’s Haswell, but may also exist on newer systems (e.g. Skylake) or older (e.g. Ivy Bridge) with Asus motherboards, as well as Asus desktops or laptops.
Keep in mind that I am not going to talk about this issue and third-party UEFI boot managers such as rEFInd here.
###Why ed(1) is not a good editor today
I’ll start with my tweet:
Heretical Unix opinion time: ed(1) may be the 'standard Unix editor', but it is not a particularly good editor outside of a limited environment that almost never applies today.
There is a certain portion of Unixdom that really likes ed(1), the ‘standard Unix editor’. Having actually used ed for a not insignificant amount of time (although it was the friendlier ‘UofT ed’ variant), I have some reactions to what I feel is sometimes overzealous praise of it. One of these is what I tweeted.
##Beastie Bits
##Feedback/Questions
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