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DragonflyBSD Sees Huge Multi-Core Speed Boosts

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  • DragonflyBSD Sees Huge Multi-Core Speed Boosts

    Phoronix: DragonflyBSD Sees Huge Multi-Core Speed Boosts

    If you're a user of DragonflyBSD, the next release of this popular BSD operating system is about to see huge performance improvements in its kernel if you're using a multi-core/processor system...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    Is this patch also relevant to FreeBSD? i.e. Can it be ported to FreeBSD or has it already been done such that this was merely a duplication of effort?

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    • #3
      Originally posted by Shining Arcanine View Post
      Is this patch also relevant to FreeBSD? i.e. Can it be ported to FreeBSD or has it already been done such that this was merely a duplication of effort?
      I'm not sure about the technical details, but Matthew Dillon is a former FreeBSD developer. He created it as a fork of FreeBSD 4.8 due to technical differencies with the project.

      This smart guy isn't new at all. He did the DICE compiler for Amiga computers and worked on the Linux kernel with others like Alan Cox. He founded an ISP that was later sold to Verio (now owned by the japanese giant NTT).

      The project gets stuff from other members of the BSD family, it seems like taking the best of each one of them and not duplicating efforts that can go to other more interesting areas (like the one on the news). They use pkgsrc for their package system from NetBSD, up to date PF & friends from OpenBSD, drivers from FreeBSD, tmpfs from NetBSD.

      They also use new stuff like Light Weight Kernel Threads (LWKT) implementation and a light weight ports/messaging system. The project is inspired by some AmigaOS concepts, as he has an Amiga background from the past (he even did a C compiler).

      The project is like the Frankenstein's BSD, with ambitions related to clustering like SSI support and such. It's an ambitious project developing their own stuff, so it can make the BSD world more interesting because it's a quite progressive and innovative project

      I hope they success in their goals and more, and even support other platforms like ARM. I would like to see an ARM supercomputer running dfbsd

      So well, maybe this feature relies on specific DragonFly BSD technology, it seems quite probably from my point of view.

      If some of you is interested in following the project, I recommend to read this related blog: http://www.shiningsilence.com/dbsdlog/

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      • #4
        The virtual memory system should be a copy and paste from FreeBSD. I doubt that this relies on DragonBSD specific bits, although without seeing the code, I would not know. I asked because I want to avoid reading the code.

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        • #5
          Originally posted by Shining Arcanine View Post
          The virtual memory system should be a copy and paste from FreeBSD. I doubt that this relies on DragonBSD specific bits, although without seeing the code, I would not know. I asked because I want to avoid reading the code.
          The DragonFly BSD virtual memory subsystem has diverged quite a bit from the FreeBSD one since the fork 9 years ago. We use both different multiprocessor synchronization primitives and strategies than the ones FreeBSD employs. There is no "copy and paste" involved at this point.

          One of the novel features our VM has evolved to support is called swapcache, it is good for a bit of performance, as you can see here: http://www.shiningsilence.com/dbsdlo...4/12/7586.html.

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          • #6
            Has anyone benchmarked how these changes compare to FreeBSD and other operating systems?

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