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Date:      Fri, 16 Jul 2004 10:45:35 +0300
From:      Nikos Vassiliadis <nvass@teledome.gr>
To:        Wojciech Puchar <wojtek@tensor.3miasto.net>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD beginner (NetBSD advanced)
Message-ID:  <200407161045.35953.nvass@teledome.gr>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.NEB.4.60.0407152340010.21629@chylonia.3miasto.net>
References:  <Pine.NEB.4.60.0407152019430.24734@chylonia.3miasto.net> <40F6DAC9.9020403@mac.com> <Pine.NEB.4.60.0407152340010.21629@chylonia.3miasto.net>

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I have used a single 256MB mfs on FreeBSD for months without any problem.
I was not doing heavy IO on it, it was used in a /tmp fashion and most of the
time was swapped out, going down to 8MB resident size at times.

> softdeps in NetBSD is very buggy. putting very high load like deleting
> huge tree or unpacking it easily triggers DDB with ffs_something panic :(

I have the feeling that NetBSD without softdeps performs much better than
FreeBSD. I can live without them on NetBSD.

I think you will miss ALTQ. There is a patch for FreeBSD-4.8 at Kenjiro's page.

NikV

On Friday 16 July 2004 00:50, Wojciech Puchar wrote:
> > Wojciech Puchar wrote:
> >> i installed FreeBSD once to do quick performance tests, and at least in
> >> disk I/O and fair scheduling it's MUCH better (tested 4.10 and 5.1).
> >
> > It's nice to be welcomed by higher performance when you switch OSes.  :-)
>
> while high performance is always cool, stable performance is even more
> important under load. I mean if i do 5 things it shouldn't slow down 100
> times.
>
> in NetBSD especially if you start large file copying whole system slows
> down terribly. not true with FreeBSD.
>
> softdeps in NetBSD is very buggy. putting very high load like deleting
> huge tree or unpacking it easily triggers DDB with ffs_something panic :(
>
> >> my questions:
> >>
> >> 1) what is Buf and Cache in top exactly? why buf on 96MB machine gets to
> >> near 20MB and never goes down? it's almost 1/4 of memory size.
> >
> > Cache: number of pages used for VM-level disk caching
> > Buf:   number of pages used for BIO-level disk caching
>
> can you explain more? (or redirect me to URL about it)
>
> is all things double-buffered?!!!!!! it would be lots of memory traffic.
>
>
> BTW is mfs usable and stable in FreeBSD? and does it make real sense?
>
> in NetBSD mfs is terribly unstable. especially large mfs disks easily
> crash things.
>
> >> 2) can i compile kernel with -march=pentium,pentium[234] -O2
> >> optimization? in NetBSD 2.0 doing -march=pentium produces kernel that
> >> doesn't boot at all, just resets.
> >
> > If you want to tune your system, tweaking the options from GENERIC by
> > removing at least:
> >
> > cpu             I386_CPU
> > cpu             I486_CPU
>
> did this.
>
> > ...will probably result in the greatest improvement, along with disabling
> > WITNESS and such if using -CURRENT.  See "man tuning".
>
> oh - i never did it...
>
> > Using -march=pentium is likely to be worthwhile (assuming you don't have
> > a
>
> with heavy CPU-bound userland binaries i measured 10-25% gain.
>
> > 386 :-), higher than that may run into problems.  Higher optimizations
> > than -O are not supported, although work is underway to fix the remaining
> > code issues (mainly in libalias used by NAT), as I understand.
> >
> > If you want to try -O2, give it a shot, but you might consider using
> > either "-Os" rather than "-O2", or try "-O2 -fno-strict-aliasing".
>
> why -Os? it makes slower but smaller code?
>
> will lower memory traffic/better cache hitting give more gain than it's
> lost because of slower code.
>
> >> 3) how can i disable compiling, using etc.. all that LKM (KLD) stuff?
> >>
> >> i really prefer one static kernel.
> >
> > Read the handbook on building the kernel.
>
> what i missed?
>
> i already built a kernel, found how to disable modules but all kld stuff
> is still compiled in!
>
> yes i can just do rm *.ko but removing kld from kernel would be even
> nicer.
>
> >> 4) is IPv6 working well? (i mean no crashes etc...) i will get real IPv6
> >> zone allocation soon and want to use it.
> >
> > IPv6 seems to work well, yes.
> >
> >> 5) what is used in FreeBSD for traffic management. NetBSD has altq -
> >> please just give me a name i will RTFM.
> >
> > If you want to use that, ipf/altq should be available in -CURRENT.
> > Otherwise, ipfw & dummynet is another choice.
> >
> >> 6) how to turn using serial port as console on i386? my home machine is
> >> headless, i'm using X terminals to access it.
> >
> > See the handbook.
> >
> >> 7) does FreeBSD support 2 CPUs on i386?
> >
> > Sure.  See the SMP section of the kernel config file.
> >
> >> should i go to 4.10 or better 5.2.1? stability is really important to
> >> me.
> >
> > 4.10, unless there's a feature from -CURRENT that you don't want to live
> > without.
>
> i don't think it is unless 4.10 has:
>
> 1) multiCPU
> 2) traffic shaping
> 3) nat
> 4) firewalling
> 5) IPv6
> 6) tun device
>
> i don't think i need anything more
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