Kernel

Before reporting this to the list, I would first gather enough information.

Alu’s server boxes is suffering in continued reboot when server is loaded. Because he is supporting FreeBSD by utilizing 5.3-RC1 in his production environment (and it’s moderately loaded as it is connected to the ChinaNet Backbone), and donated many devices for dedicated services of the FreeBSD China Community, I think we must help him to solve these out.

I have plugged a new kernel configuration on his box in order to obtain a (potential) crashdump and figure out what is happening. Maybe we will get it tomorrow.

Scott Long has branched RELENG_5_3 (also RELENG_5_3_BP tag) and 5.3-RC1 is coming REALLY SOON.

It turns out that we have to optimize our FS before benchmarking. I have read some articles and maillist archives so I got some impression:

1. Give correct parameters to newfs(1)
   avgfilesize, filesperdir, will control DIRPERF hashing.

2. Turn on noatime mounts.

3. etc.

Just make a note.

As always, it’s available at ftp.freebsdchina.org/china_ports/delphijfork.

I have adopted all RELENG_5 features here, bind9, etc. Also the delphijfork features are retained.

It seems that OpenBSD folks has branched their OPENBSD_3_6 branch. OpenBSD 3.6 will be released on November 1, 2004.

Finally I am thinking about porting ReiserFS4 to FreeBSD. The current ReiserFS is GPL’ed so it should not get into FreeBSD kernel, but I think it might be OK to leave it as a ports of kernel module (like pf).

To quote his “I would recommend against per-thread caches. Instead, make the per-cpu caches actually *be* per-cpu (that is, not require a mutex).”

Then, he has pointed out that there is potential problems in FreeBSD’s SLAB allocator which is different from DragonFly’s. (Not too surprisingly, he is again advertising his IPI message approach).

About 9 Years ago, FreeBSD has introduced a functionality in sysinstall(8)’s partition editor, which is to mark a partition “active”.

However, unfortunatelly, the implementation contained a flow from the day 0 it was introduced. Sysinstall(8) depends on user’s sanity not to mark only one partition as active on one disk.

This turned out to a potential damage of disk partition table. With two partitions marked “ACTIVE”, you will get the following message:

“Invalid partition table.”

Then system will halt.

It’s here:

ftp://cnftp.bjut.edu.cn/pub/iso/delphijfork-5.3/

This is mostly equal to 5.3-BETA3.

Just found from their site…