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NetBSD 5.0: benchmarks and an introduction
I have prepared a presentation giving an overview of some of the new features, technology and performance improvements debuting in NetBSD 5.0. You can find the slides from this presentation here:
A comparison of the scalability and performance improvements found in NetBSD 5.0 was conducted against NetBSD 4.0, Fedora Core 10 and FreeBSD 7.1, and is part of the presentation. An outline is below, but for full details on the tests, please refer to the slides. Please click on the images to view a larger version of each.
Benchmark: hackbench
This benchmark tests the efficiency and scalability of the scheduler and IPC (inter-process commmunication) mechanisms. It was created by and is popular with Linux kernel developers. Hackbench quickly exposes problems with SMP scaling, and with high numbers of active tasks.
Benchmark: MySQL sysbench
This test simulates an OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) style database workload. From the OS developer's viewpoint, it measures the efficiency and scalability of threading, memory allocation, and IPC.
Benchmark: build.sh, NetBSD's build system
This test measures how well the operating system scales when given hosting an intensive software development or shell type workload.
Fedora continues to excel due to the significant investment in improving the efficiency and scalability of Linux over the last few years. Our hats are off to the GNU/Linux/Fedora developers. We aim to reverse the position with the release of NetBSD 6.0.
Automated testing in NetBSD 5.0
With the release of NetBSD 5.0, a new testing infrastructure for the operating system will get wide exposure. This testing infrastructure is based on the Automated Testing Framework (ATF), a project that was started as part of the Google Summer of Code 2007 program, and that provides a platform-independent framework to easily write and automatically exercise test cases. As of this release, only a few NetBSD-specific tests are available as ATF-based tests, but they are a good preview of what the future will look like.
Starting from this release, you will see a new tests.tgz distribution set during the installation of NetBSD. If you choose to install it, sysinst will populate /usr/tests with a new collection of test programs that are based on the ATF framework. Once installed, edit /etc/atf/NetBSD.conf to suit your system preferences and then, to run the tests, do:
# cd /usr/tests
# atf-run | atf-report
The whole idea of providing the test programs as an installable distribution set is that your specific combination of hardware and software is not available to system developers, so only you can make sure that the system behaves as it should. Furthermore, by successfully running the tests, you can have a good feeling that everything is working as expected!
As far as I know, there are some tests in this release that are broken, but I'm not sure if this is because the tests themselves are broken or because the features under test are broken. Help is welcome in this area!
There is still a lot of work to do in the automated testing area... but the fact that ATF is now bundled in a formal release of NetBSD raises my willingness to work on it. If only I had enough time... At the very least, expect many more ATF-based test cases in NetBSD 6.0.
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NetBSD is now available on Twitter!
There are also facebook groups and pages you can add:
- NetBSD group.
- The NetBSD Project page.
- NetBSD Users group.
- pkgsrc page.
Google's Summer of Code 2009
Google has announced the mentoring organizations for Summer of Code 2009. This will be the fifth year that NetBSD has been able to participate.
A list of available projects can be found here. If you are interested in working on any of these projects, please contact the developer and/or mailing list referenced next to each item, and try to answer as many questions from our Project Application HowTo as possible. The interested developers will be glad to respond to you there.
In the meantime, prospective students should keep an eye on deadlines as application are only open between 23 March 2009 and 3 April 2009. Further information is available on the Summer of Code FAQ page.
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Qt/Embedded @ wscons
Some time ago I finally found a small box of round tuits and ported Qt/Embedded to run on top of wscons. Unfortunately, day job and other things have been sucking most of my time, so after sitting on these patches for almost a month I figured that may be someone out there may be interested enough to pick this up.
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NetBSD@CeBIT 2009
The CeBIT which is the biggest IT-related fair in Europe is currently on in Hannover/Germany. The allBSD Project which was founded to focus on marketing related things for all the different BSDs was able to get a small booth. The booth is showing a Xen 3 showcase based on NetBSD and provides informational material to the visitors of the fair. I joined them for one and a half days at the booth and tried to answer all the questions. All the reactions from the visitors show that there is an interest in the BSD based operating systems.
One thing which seems to be very important in these days are small flyers which can be taken by the visitors. We need to create more informational material, anyone who is willing to contribute is a great help.
CeBIT will close its doors on Sunday 8 March 2009, make sure to visit the BSD booth in Hall 6, F50.
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OpenJDK 7 binaries for NetBSD/i386 5.0
OpenJDK 7 binaries built on NetBSD/i386 5.0 for both the JRE and JDK are now available. Note that you may need to add the -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true parameter to the java command line for IPv4 networking to work properly on an IPv6-enabled kernel such as GENERIC.
jmcneill@endeavour:/export/home/jmcneill/jdk/jdk1.7.0 > ./bin/java -version openjdk version "1.7.0-internal" OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0-internal-jmcneill_2009_01_29_15_36-b00) OpenJDK Client VM (build 14.0-b10, mixed mode)[0 comments]