KernelTrap - NetBSD

NetBSD 5.0.1 siginfo_t struct compile errors

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:27:50 +0000

Hi,

When I define any structure member variable with either si_signo, si_code, or si_errno, I got a compiler syntax error. The workaround is to undef these member variables. These variables are posix standard variable for siginfo_t struct. But since I define my own struct tag the compier is not suppose to complaint about it.

#include
#include

BSDCan 2008: Hardware Sensors Framework

Jeremy — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 18:09:21 +0000

Constantine Murenin offered a history of the OpenBSD hardware sensors framework during his talk at BSDCan 2008, describing how it was originally based on a port from NetBSD, then evolved and was eventually ported to all the BSDs. He also discussed his own involvement with the framework, having ported it from OpenBSD to FreeBSD as a Summer of Code project, and how his port was merged into DragonFly BSD. At the end of the talk, there were some interesting ecxhanges between Constantine and Poul-Henning Kamp, the latter explaining why he'd had the code backed out of FreeBSD and why he continues to oppose it being merged back in.

BSDCan 2008: Google Summer of Code

Jeremy — Sat, 17 May 2008 15:24:47 +0000

Leslie Hawthorn, a Program Manager in Google's Open Source team, gave a talk at BSDCAN 2008 on Google's ongoing Summer of Code project. She started by explaining what the open source team does, including enforcing license compliance, hosting over 700,000 open source projects with Google Code, academic research, funding open source development, and community outreach including the sponsorship of conferences such as BSDCan. She went on to discuss how she got started running the project after its initial launch in 2005.

Having sponsored four summer of code's now, Leslie noted that Google has had over 1,500 "graduates" and over 2,000 mentors involved, coming from over 98 countries and working with over 175 open source projects. By the end of the currently in progress 2008 Summer of Code, the project will have provided over 10 million US dollars in funding, generating over 6 million lines of code.

BSDCan 2008

Jeremy — Thu, 15 May 2008 02:02:26 +0000

KernelTrap is excited to be able to offer live coverage of this year's BSDCan 2008 in Ottawa, Canada on May 16th and 17th. The two day conference takes place at the University of Ottawa, and was organized for the fifth consecutive year by Dan Langille who has also made it possible for me to attend and cover the event on KernelTrap. I spoke with Dan to get some background information on the conference, and learn about some of the upcoming highlights.

The event's webpage explains:

"BSDCan, a BSD conference held in Ottawa, Canada, has quickly established itself as the technical conference for people working on and with 4.4BSD based operating systems and related projects. The organizers have found a fantastic formula that appeals to a wide range of people from extreme novices to advanced developers."

Google's Summer of Code 2008

Jeremy — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 11:58:20 +0000

"Google Summer of Code 2008 is on! Over the past three years, the program has brought together over 1500 students and 2000 mentors from 90 countries worldwide, all for the love of code. We look forward to welcoming more new contributors and projects this year," begins a page listing all the projects planning to participate in this year's GSoC. Among the numerous planned participtants there are many kernel projects, including DragonFly BSD, FreeBSD, Git, GNU/Hurd, Linux, Minix, and NetBSD.

Student applications for GSoC projects begin today, running through the end of the month. Read on for many of the participation announcements from the above projects. For more information about the GSoC, the program's FAQ explains:

"Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects. Google will be working with a several open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period. Historically, the program has brought together over 1,500 students with over 130 open source projects to create millions of lines of code. The program, which kicked off in 2005, is now in its fourth year."

NetBSD Summer of Code Summary

Jeremy — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 11:22:56 +0000

Mark Weinem offered a summary of NetBSD's six 2007 Summer of Code development projects. The projects included: the Automated Testing Framework, "the goal of the ATF project was to develop a testing framework to easily define test cases and run them in a completely automated way"; porting ZFS, "the primary goal of this project was to port volume emulation (ZVOL) functionality in order to mount ZFS file systems"; QoS framework for NetBSD's virtual memory system, "for delay sensitive systems such as streaming multimedia servers and back-end database systems, servicing the reader processes in a timely fashion is more important than the servicing the writers"; kernel file systems in userspace, as a result of the project, "almost all NetBSD kernel file systems can be compiled, mounted and run in userspace"; and hardware monitoring, "the aim of this project was to develop a kernel event notification framework to notify userland of hardware changes e.g. a new USB device being added". Mark added:

"NetBSD has been involved in the Google Summer of Code since its conception in 2005. This year we were glad to once again have the oppertunity to introduce six students to our operating system, to Open Source software development and get them sponsored by Google to work on projects defined by the NetBSD developers."

Threading Benchmarks, NetBSD versus FreeBSD

Jeremy — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 00:24:54 +0000

Andrew Doran posted some threading benchmark results to NetBSD's tech-kern mailing list, following up to some benchmarks he'd posted earlier. The results compared NetBSD -current with FreeBSD -current, and the Linux 2.6.21 kernel. Kris Kennaway was surprised by the results, and ran his own benchmarks with minimal configuration changes, summarizing, "this measurement shows that FreeBSD is performing 70-80% better than NetBSD in this 4 CPU configuration. This is in contrast to Andrew's findings which seem to show NetBSD performing 10% better than FreeBSD on a 4 CPU system (a very old one though)." He added, "the drop-off above 8 threads on FreeBSD is due to non-scalability of mysql itself. i.e. it comes from pthread mutex contention in userland."

Kris ran additional benchmarks with PostgreSQL instead of MySQL, showing much improved scalability above 8 threads, "postgresql is much more scalable than mysql on this workload and doesn't have silly scaling bottlenecks inside the application (cf the tail of the FreeBSD curve for mysql which is where pthread mutex contention kicked in)." He continued his testing, and found that on older 4CPU P3 hardware NetBSD did outperform FreeBSD, "but only by 3-4% (in particular I am not seeing the ~10% difference that Andrew observes on his 4*p3 700MHz). Given the age of the hardware and the fact that I am not seeing it on other workloads or on modern hardware it might just be due to a small scheduling difference on this configuration."