Greetz,
I got my hands on a SunFire x4600. This is a dual-core 8-way
Opteron (dmesg shows 16 CPUs) w/c has 32G RAM. FreeBSD 6.2/amd64 runs
fine on it despite:
- 'reboot' doesnt work, machine just hangs in there.
- front USB ports wont work for a USB keyboard, just use da ports at da back.
I've read a lot of threads in da past (and da BSDCan 2006 paper)
regarding mfs on /usr/src and /usr/obj to speed up buildworlds,
unfortunately it doesnt seem to improve things. I've tried both a
malloc and swap based async non-softupdates mfs (and rebooted da box
every after) but my buildworld speeds seem to be just da same as I do
it on da MPT SAS disk w/c is just around ~18mins.
Yeah, i know there's da tmpfs project but I was just wondering if I
may have missed somthing in my mfs adventures.
Thanks ;-)
cheers
mars
Hi, Can you provide some more details about what's not working? Someone may be interested in (at least trying) fixing these bugs. :) Did you try buildworld with -j option? Regards, Andras Mars G. Miro wrote:> Greetz, > > I got my hands on a SunFire x4600. This is a dual-core 8-way > Opteron (dmesg shows 16 CPUs) w/c has 32G RAM. FreeBSD 6.2/amd64 runs > fine on it despite: > - 'reboot' doesnt work, machine just hangs in there. > - front USB ports wont work for a USB keyboard, just use da ports at > da back. > > I've read a lot of threads in da past (and da BSDCan 2006 paper) > regarding mfs on /usr/src and /usr/obj to speed up buildworlds, > unfortunately it doesnt seem to improve things. I've tried both a > malloc and swap based async non-softupdates mfs (and rebooted da box > every after) but my buildworld speeds seem to be just da same as I do > it on da MPT SAS disk w/c is just around ~18mins. > > Yeah, i know there's da tmpfs project but I was just wondering if I > may have missed somthing in my mfs adventures. > > Thanks ;-) > > > cheers > mars > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-stable-unsubscribe@freebsd.org" >
On Thu, May 03, 2007 at 02:39:55AM +0800, Mars G. Miro wrote:> Greetz, > > I got my hands on a SunFire x4600. This is a dual-core 8-way > Opteron (dmesg shows 16 CPUs) w/c has 32G RAM. FreeBSD 6.2/amd64 runs > fine on it despite: > - 'reboot' doesnt work, machine just hangs in there.There is a sysctl to specify an alternate reboot method.> - front USB ports wont work for a USB keyboard, just use da ports at da > back. > > I've read a lot of threads in da past (and da BSDCan 2006 paper) > regarding mfs on /usr/src and /usr/obj to speed up buildworlds, > unfortunately it doesnt seem to improve things. I've tried both a > malloc and swap based async non-softupdates mfs (and rebooted da box > every after) but my buildworld speeds seem to be just da same as I do > it on da MPT SAS disk w/c is just around ~18mins.It is probably a combination of issues: 1) There is still some disk access because of accessing things like binaries in /usr. This will hurt more for parallel builds because your disk hardware is single-threaded, so I/O delays will serialize you. If you really wanted you could compare to a build in a md-hosted chroot to completely eliminate the disk, but this is just a game. 2) Buildworld doesn't parallelize well to 16 CPUs. Large parts of it are completely non-parallel. This is probably your main problem. You definitely should be measuring some difference - you need to use time(1) though instead of just estimating. Kris
Mars G. Miro wrote:> Greetz, > > I got my hands on a SunFire x4600. This is a dual-core 8-way > Opteron (dmesg shows 16 CPUs) w/c has 32G RAM. FreeBSD 6.2/amd64 runs > fine on it despite: > - 'reboot' doesnt work, machine just hangs in there. > - front USB ports wont work for a USB keyboard, just use da ports at > da back. > > I've read a lot of threads in da past (and da BSDCan 2006 paper) > regarding mfs on /usr/src and /usr/obj to speed up buildworlds, > unfortunately it doesnt seem to improve things. I've tried both a > malloc and swap based async non-softupdates mfs (and rebooted da box > every after) but my buildworld speeds seem to be just da same as I do > it on da MPT SAS disk w/c is just around ~18mins.When you have 32GB of RAM and 16 CPUs I'm not sure this applies. Is 18 minutes really too long to wait? :-)> Yeah, i know there's da tmpfs project but I was just wondering if I > may have missed somthing in my mfs adventures. >PS. s/da/the/g (please!) Dominic
On May 2, 2007, at 2:39 PM, Mars G. Miro wrote:> - front USB ports wont work for a USB keyboard, just use da ports > at da back.applies to X4100 as well. I think sun just makes them that way :-)
On 5/8/07, Kris Kennaway <kris@obsecurity.org> wrote:> On Tue, May 08, 2007 at 11:45:12AM +0800, Mars G. Miro wrote: > > > that or, does mfs speeding things up really work? remains to be > > seen ... > > Of course it does...even the fastest disk hardware on the market > (well, as of a year ago) is several times slower than memory writing, > and commodity disk hardware is orders of magnitude slower. Yes, I > have the measurements to prove this: > > http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/Filesystem%20Performance.pdf >That was the paper I was referring to in my 1st email. Do you still have your scripts that you could prolly make publicly available? As some of you might have noticed already, I have a plethora of exotic machines and hardware on my hands that i could test FreeBSD on ;-)> Kris >cheers mars