From owner-freebsd-chat Sun Nov 17 14:58:42 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3043F37B401 for ; Sun, 17 Nov 2002 14:58:40 -0800 (PST) Received: from vienna9.his.com (vienna9.his.com [216.200.68.14]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0020B43E6E for ; Sun, 17 Nov 2002 14:58:29 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from brad.knowles@skynet.be) Received: from [213.136.30.47] (shub@[127.0.0.1]) by vienna9.his.com (8.11.6/8.10.1) with ESMTP id gAHLcif07471; Sun, 17 Nov 2002 16:38:45 -0500 (EST) Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Sender: bs663385@127.0.0.1 Message-Id: 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> X-Grok: +++ath X-WebTV-Stationery: Standard; BGColor=black; TextColor=black Reply-By: Wed, 1 Jan 1984 12:34:56 +0100 Date: Sun, 17 Nov 2002 22:33:13 +0100 To: Eric Anderson From: Brad Knowles Subject: Re: FreeBSD: Server or Desktop OS? Cc: Mattias Pantzare , Anthony Atkielski , FreeBSD Chat , Mark Murray Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org 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, "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(+++) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message