Date: Sun, 17 Nov 2002 22:33:13 +0100 From: Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be> To: Eric Anderson <anderson@centtech.com> Cc: Mattias Pantzare <pantzer@ludd.luth.se>, Anthony Atkielski <anthony@freebie.atkielski.com>, FreeBSD Chat <freebsd-chat@freebsd.org>, Mark Murray <mark@grondar.za> Subject: Re: FreeBSD: Server or Desktop OS? Message-ID: <a05200f02b9fdb6ba20c2@[213.136.30.47]> In-Reply-To: <3DD7F107.DCE620A6@centtech.com> References: <20021116232242.S23359-100000@hub.org> <04f801c28e20$0a3665b0$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <3DD7CF81.7030407@cream.org> <056001c28e60$2af21cf0$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <1037560276.1094.19.camel@skalman.campus.luth.se> <3DD7F107.DCE620A6@centtech.com>
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At 1:41 PM -0600 2002/11/17, Eric Anderson wrote:
> I said once a long time ago, that FreeBSD needs a group of volunteers
> willing to do their share at finding bugs - this has to be an organized
> group of people, not just a "go ahead and find bugs, no one is stopping
> you" sort of thing. Finding bugs in hardware has the same problems, and
> all developers that have jobs that depend on the quality of the
> product do "verification" on their products.
I think a dedicated team of QA people is a good idea. Indeed,
Mark Murray just yesterday (at BSDCon Europe 2002) convinced me that
I need to participate in this kind of process for -CURRENT. I would
like to see this process formalized as an actual project within
FreeBSD.
I am not a programmer, so I am limited in the number of ways I
can contribute to the project. Amongst almost all multi-person open
source development projects, it has been my experience that there is
a serious "glass ceiling" above the head of anyone who wants to
contribute but doesn't write code.
However, I have been doing various types of performance tuning
for a while, and I can usually manage to set up environments where I
beat the hell out of systems (such as I was trying to do for my talk
last week at LISA 2002 and my talk yesterday at BSDCon Europe 2000).
I would like to think I have at least some problem-solving ability,
and that I could provide assistance in finding bugs, and with the
help of other people who can program, we can get these bugs
eliminated before the code ships.
Of course, we'd need to have two teams -- the people who test
-CURRENT before it becomes -STABLE, and the people who test -STABLE
before it becomes -RELEASE. Hopefully, there would be some overlap,
and some people could help test in both environments.
Myself, I'm going to be testing on a single machine in my
basement, at least for now. It's the only FreeBSD-capable system I
have (my wife's previous laptop, a Compaq Armada 4131T, w/ 48MB of
RAM, a Pentium-133, and a 10GB hard drive upgrade I put in myself).
Once the SPARC and PowerPC efforts come further along, I've also got
an ancient Twinhead Twinstationg 5G (Sun SPPARCstation 5 clone) and
an Apple PowerMac 7200/90 that I could potentially use for testing
those platforms as well.
However, while I need an application that will beat the hell out
of the system, I also need something that won't be truly
mission-critical, because I do have only the one (ancient) system.
If (when) my test system dies, I need to make sure that my wife won't
be excessively negatively impacted -- especially since I might be
away at a conference or consulting at a customer site when it dies.
Classic Cobbler's Children issue, but there you have it.
I would like to try running these things at least briefly on
4.6.2-RELEASE (since that's what is installed on that machine now),
so that I can try to isolate the -CURRENT specific issues when I
change the OS. I got a copy of the 4.6 and 4.7 DVDs, one of which
has the -CURRENT-DP1 image, and that will probably be my next jump.
After that, I'll go to -DP2.
For now, it looks like running a squid web proxy will help in the
area of thrashing disk I/O, and I'm thinking I'll also run a caching
nameserver inside my home network.
Any further advice as to other useful, performance-enhancing, but
not necessarily mission-critical applications would be greatly
appreciated.
--
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles@skynet.be>
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.
GCS/IT d+(-) s:+(++)>: a C++(+++)$ UMBSHI++++$ P+>++ L+ !E W+++(--) N+ !w---
O- M++ V PS++(+++) PE- Y+(++) PGP>+++ t+(+++) 5++(+++) X++(+++) R+(+++)
tv+(+++) b+(++++) DI+(++++) D+(++) G+(++++) e++>++++ h--- r---(+++)* z(+++)
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