FreeBSD

The patchset would teach inetd(8) about kqueue, which is originally authored by John-Mark and I have integerated it into the “delphijfork”. Now it was updated to fit 7.0-CURRENT.

Now this server is running:

[delphij@tarsier] ~> uname -a
FreeBSD tarsier.delphij.net 6.0-RELEASE FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE #0: Wed Nov 2 14:39:40 CST 2005 delphij@tarsier.delphij.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/TARSIER i386

这是一篇几年前的文章，发表地我已经记不清楚了。除了这篇文章对FreeBSD开发模式和如何成为 committer 的介绍之外，我还希望看到这篇文章的人，能够成为国人在 FreeBSD 中的中坚分子，让我们(华人)成为整个项目最重要的一部分。

拥抱FreeBSD

FreeBSD项目的结构

和FreeBSD项目关联的人大体分为三类，即被称为commiter的开发者，由其中9名组成的core team，及其他的贡献于FreeBSD的人们。

commiter是FreeBSD项目的正式开发者，他们拥有对原始码的直接修改权限。现在大约有330名commiter，其中47名在日本。

commiter并不只是自己写代码的人，为别人写的ports做登录，或者写文档等等，还有负责各种分野的commiter存在。core team是从这些commiter中选出来的，共有9人。所有的commiter都有投票权，从候选人中投票选举9人组成core team。在今年6月份进行的选举中，包括笔者在内的9人当选进入了core team，任期为2年。

最近 current 邮件列表讨论的很凶的一个问题是，MySQL很不理性地在每一个I/O操作时都调一次time()。这一操作在FreeBSD上面相当的昂贵(为了保证精度)，而Linux采取了许多优化(有些是牺牲精度的)措施，因而性能差距越来越大。

于是有一个人在FreeBSD上做了试验，说改一下默认的时钟能够将性能提高6倍……不带这么玩的，ft……

BTW. clive也测了一下，在他机器上结果是：

A collegue of mine has reported a FreeBSD “bug” that, when the main thread exits, the whole process is terminated. He complained that pthread_detach() would not cause the thread to run without the main thread, while Linux did.

With some experiments we have figured out that this is actually a Linux bug, which violates POSIX. Interestingly, Solaris has the same behavior that FreeBSD have.

The POSIX pthread_create() said:

Note that the thread in which main() was originally invokeddiffers from this. When it returns from main(), the effectshall be as if there was an implicit call to exit() usingthe return value of main() as the exit status."

I think we would be going to release 6.0-RC2 soon, to encourage more testing against the recently caught issues that addressed several race conditions, etc.

It seems that we still have some race conditions that can lead to strange issues and we may want to discourage this for 6.0-RELEASE.

Alan Cox has committed some fixes for the issue, hope these can be merged back.

Strange thing happen.

0. Start your FreeBSD single-user.
1. Run /etc/netstart so your network is up.
2. Run /etc/rc.d/sshd start so you have sshd
3. Use ssh to login localhost, then su(1) to root
4. Type “init q”

Then init(8) would crash with signal 11. Yes, it was killed. As soon as kernel found this, it would panic with “Going nowhere without my init!”.

Well, this Saturday and Sunday is not for rest, because we have a 7-days’ vacation from October 1.

I think FreeBSD 6.0-STABLE (RELENG_6) is in a quite nice shape and it’s a good time to cut 6.0-RC1 (also RELENG_6_0) and be more careful committing code against RELENG_6. However, according to my diff service there are still a lot of unmerged changes.

I have submitted a plenty (about 4 or 5 or even 6 dozens) of MFC requests last week. I wish that the diff reduction part of these changes, in conjunction with important bugfixes, would got approved soon so we will have a healthy RC1 for test.

Emily Boyd同学设计的新版 www.FreeBSD.org 今天上线了，很漂亮。不知道我们什么时候能让中文版跟上……