http://www.osnews.com/story/7152/OpenBSD_3_4_3_5_for_SPARC64_Addendum Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:22:09 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Overall a good article. OpenBSD generally tends to be slower in many aspects than other OS's. However, if you can, could you do some testing with Solaris 10 Beta 3 and see how it performs over Solaris 9? In addition, what release of Solaris 9 are you running? You've tuned the other OS's but I didn't see any tuning for Solaris on your part.

As a side note, there is another thread on usenet talking about one of your articles (gcc optimizations). In this case: gcc vs. forte
http://groups.google.ca/groups?dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&a... Wed, 26 May 2004 04:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? By default FreeBSD is quite slow (focus on stability more then performance out of the box), and needs to be tuned. I've seen benchmarks of FreeBSD before and after a good tune and its night and day. I suspect FreeBSD was not properly tuned, since it often at least compares well to Linux or is faster depending on the area.

What about tuning OpenBSD? Sure, even with tuning its not likely to be as fast as Linux but surely it could close the gap. I agree with Bruno, a Solaris 10 beta vs 9 would be very interesting indeed. :-) Wed, 26 May 2004 04:23:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? and, for me, none of the graphics loaded so I wasn't able to view the benchmark results, but the accompaning text still helped me read the results. Whats wrong? Wed, 26 May 2004 04:28:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Can you determine why they aren't loading? DNS issue? Connectivity?

They're currently being hosted off my personal site, vegan.net. Wed, 26 May 2004 04:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Has anyone notified Theo of this? The insert performance is atrocious! Maybe some OpenBSD developers can find out what the bottle-neck is?... or is MySQL not something that OpenBSD people consider to be core to the use of OpenBSD? (ie. not a router/firewall/etc) Wed, 26 May 2004 05:25:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? There are many options that can be tuned on all platforms to make it faster and performance better. I'm sure with appropriate tuning OpenBSD and FreeBSD could come well within the linux benchmarks. And just think on top of that OpenBSDs W^X and GCC+Propolice provide that extra layer of security that your looking for in a secure server Wed, 26 May 2004 05:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? What tuning would you suggest? Wed, 26 May 2004 06:03:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Well, I am at work and that might be why, military base n all. I'm behind a proxy. I'll try again once I get home. Wed, 26 May 2004 07:17:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Have you checked out the OpenBSD FAQ?

http://openbsd.org/faq/index.html

Lots of good information in there, also check the man pages. OpenBSD does not yet have a unified buffercache which really hurts performance, change the max nodes value to kick up disk performance -

http://openbsd.org/faq/faq11.html#maxvnodes

and I'm sure theres more I'm missing. There are lots of ways to tweak things, but there are still some fundamental performance areas where OpenBSD lacks like a zerocopy network stack, unified buffer cache, decent threading, etc. Not to say its slow, for my uses its more then fast enough. :-) Its merely slower then say Linux. Wed, 26 May 2004 07:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Solaris is better. It is the most secure operating system!! Wed, 26 May 2004 08:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The first thing I'd try is enabling soft-updates on the filesystem the database resides on (/var/mysql is the default when using the port).

This isn't necessarily enabled by default (depending on how you partition the disk during install), you can check with 'mount', if it doesn't say 'softdep' in the options for the mountpoint, it's not enabled. Just edit /etc/fstab and add that option, then remount.

It usually makes a significant difference (sometimes factors 5-10) when creating (or deleting) lots of files (like extracting a tarball, or rm -rf a directory with many entries), but it might affect MySQL's insertion (favorably) as well. Wed, 26 May 2004 08:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? >Solaris is better. It is the most secure operating system!!

I agree but there are people on this forum that believe Windows colud be as secure as Solaris or/and Linux/BSD and that there are so many
flaws and security problems just because Windows is used more...
Solaris has a bigger userbase then say OpenBSD or FreeBSD so that statement really is untrue

I use OpenBSD for 2 things: firewall/NAT/Router and my old 300mhz laptop, it ROCKS! i did not notice and speed problems but then my laptop has a load average of: 0.0 : 0.1 : 0.2 so its not that heavily
used.
ps. i ALWAYS buy my BSD cds frm the official websites, show some support please. Wed, 26 May 2004 09:32:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? duh, a big one I left out. It can make a massive difference in filesystem performance, check the faq I posted. :-) Re-run the benchmarks, I suspect a large improvement though still slower then Linux and Solaris. Wed, 26 May 2004 10:01:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Why are so many entries reported for abuse? Were any of mine abusive? Geez... Wed, 26 May 2004 10:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? on Net and OpenBSD you can check or enable softupdates by checking the fstab file in /etc, if you see something like

/dev/sd0a / ffs rw,softdep 1 1

then its enabled, if not add "softdep" and reboot. :-) Further information can be found at -

http://cvs.openbsd.org/faq/faq14.html#SoftUpdates Wed, 26 May 2004 10:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I don't have much time but a little reply:

Funny that you base all your userbase calculations on one saying of Theo De Raadt, and then present it as a fact.

And you also didn't take embedded NetBSD into account.

And besides that, how can FreeBSD go out of business? It isn't a company! Wed, 26 May 2004 10:52:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Thats an old troll, near word for word, thats been floating around for at least a few years now. Yea, it is funny that its based on the words of Theo, and I'd suspect the user base is quite larger then that. I suspect that, like Apple, the BSDs are actually growing in use but simply not as fast as Linux, so it looks like their shrinking despite growth. Wed, 26 May 2004 11:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? > ...a few days after my OpenBSD 3.4 article went up...
> ...went and released OpenBSD 3.5

> The OpenBSD team makes a new release every six months,
> with target release dates of May 1 and November 1.
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq1.html#Next Wed, 26 May 2004 11:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Everything alive dies. Its the most logical thing to do. We die, the earth dies,our sun dies, our solarsystem dies, our galaxy dies, our universe dies....

But since you took the time to paste such a nice story i will let you look at mine:

about 100.000 BSD users/systems in the world, for every 10 systems that die every week 1 comes back so thats about a loss of 9 per week, right! no if it continues to die like that it will be around for ore than 200 years. Anyway your dying too. Wed, 26 May 2004 11:52:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? There are lots of funny stories to find. For example, if you type "OpenBSD" in groups.google.nl, you get this as one of the best results:

http://groups.google.nl/groups?q=openbsd&hl=nl&lr=&ie=U...

On the other hand, I'd like to buy an Ultra 2 (dual UltraSparc) so I'm very happy he has taken the time to try all the alternative OS-es on another Sparc64 system. Now can anybody point me to his review of Linux on the Ultra 5? Wed, 26 May 2004 15:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Linux runs on Ultra 5/10. What would you like to test on it?

The fine-tuning comments that a BSD is "as fast" or "faster" than Linux kernel after they're fine-tuned are bogus since those do not take into account any fine-tuning on a Linux kernel based system. Futhermore, there's no proof stated for this. Please also note the compare is between Linux kernel 2.4.24 while 2.6.x gives a better performance (multiple articles about this on ie. kerneltrap.org).

However the Ultra5/10's have IDE which has its advantages and disadvantages. Frankly, i don't see much use of IDE when the possibility of SCSI (v3) is there on a Ultra2/30/60 -- which costs about the same. If you want to run some small database, why not take the Ultra2/30/60 instead? Wed, 26 May 2004 16:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Have you checked out the OpenBSD FAQ?

No, I've never read the FAQ. Don't let my constant references to it in the past two articles fool you

Softupdates are already enabled for those tests, as they were with FreeBSD. I don't use a BSD system without soft-updates.

Besides, in my FreeBSD tests soft-updates had little effect on the sql-bench performance metrics. You can see the differences here.

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=6552&page=2

My point is that it's frequent that when an operating system perform shows bad performance on a test someone will come up with something to the effect of "oh, tuning will fix it", which is kind of a cop out.

If is some magic tuning that I missed that OpenBSD didn't see fit to enable by defaultthat which would have tripled performance on the insert tests to bring OpenBSD in line with Linux and Solaris, I'd be willing to try it. But stabbing in the dark with a nebulous statement like "tuning will fix it" isn't adding much to the discussion.

Could tuning help? Probably, but I doubt it would bring it to the level of Linux and Solaris. And even so, I could then in turn tune Linux and Solaris and make the disparity in results between OpenBSD and Linux/Solaris even greater.

But this is only OpenBSD. These results don't preclude this system from being a production database server; the poor I/O of the Ultra 5's IDE system does. As for a router/firewall or a staging system, the results are either irrelevant or just not as important, and thus don't detract from OpenBSD being a great choice for the Ultra 5. Wed, 26 May 2004 16:35:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? But this is only OpenBSD

That line should have read: "But this is only a MySQL test". Wed, 26 May 2004 16:37:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The thing I am most interested in, is how it works for normal use.

If I understand everything right, the Solaris Free Binary License only applies to single-processor systems, so using Solaris un an ultra 2 wouldn't be really possible for me, thus I would need Linux or *BSD.

Now if I can get such a nice Ultra 2 with a Creator (3D) card, it would be rather sad if I could only use the serial console on it, as with FreeBSD. Now I have looked at the hardware compatibility of UltraLinux, FreeBSD and NetBSD, and came to the conclusion that:
- Solaris (Free) supports only one CPU,
- Linux supports everything,
- NetBSD supports most things, except those Creator cards,
- FreeBSD doesn't support keyboard, mouse, Creator cards, sound and floppy.

Now the Ultra 2 has SBUS, so adding a cheap PCI video card to get X under Net/FreeBSD would be impossible, thus based on my list the only really useful OS would be Linux. Now there is only one problem: am I right?

The thing why I was interested in if Tony had also done a review of Linux on the Ultra 5, is that I wonder how good Linux would work in general on the UltraSparc.

The reason is the following. On my Apple Performa 6400, I have installed Debian Testing/Unstable. It works really well, all hardware is supported, and I can use KDE 3.2.2, XSane and Gimp 2.0. That is, with kernel 2.4. When I installed kernel 2.6.4, all applications that dared to use a pty (like xterm or ssh) went into an endless loop doing:
modprobe -char-major 2
modprobe -char-major 2 -minor 1
modprobe -char-major 2
modprobe -char-major 2 -minor 2
modprobe -char-major 2
modprobe -char-major 2 -minor ...
...
And of course, this makes that these applications don't work and such intensive use of modprobe also makes the system unusably slow. Now I want to know if any problems like that would await me on the Sparc64 architecture too. Wed, 26 May 2004 17:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The Linux review is coming up in the next few weeks. I'll tell you this though; there are a lot of distros out there for SPARC/SPARC64, and they vary widely in usability, much more so than typical x86 distributions. Wed, 26 May 2004 17:23:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Sounds like the author might like to read up a bit more on ports and packages, how they work, the differences between them, etc.

I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a valid reason to ever "compile from source" by hand (instead of via ports, which is, in fact, also "compiling from source").

Cheers. Thu, 27 May 2004 03:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I enjoyed the article quite well. Thanks for your efforts Mr. Bourke. I have read other OpenBSD articles recently, which used a variety of benchmarks to point out OpenBSDs lack of performance compared to other systems, but this one was more thorough and more interesting to read.

I use OpenBSD a lot and I have to say that it may not be the top performer out there, but it is a solid system that has met every one of my needs. It is easy to maintain, secure, and quite stable.

I mostly use OpenBSD for my file server, firewall and web server, and I have been very pleased with it. I also use OpenBSD for a production PostgreSQL database and have consistantly been able to run complex SQL queries, that take hours to complete, without a problem.

So, while its performance may not be the best, OpenBSD offers other benefits such as ease of use, stability, timely updates, and reliability, to name a few, which outweight its slower performance. At least that is how I look at it. Thu, 27 May 2004 04:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? That was an excellent OpenBSD story on Google groups, thanks for sharing. Thu, 27 May 2004 04:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? freebsd isn't slow on default. openbsd isn't necessarily slow but its slower than alot of systems... but offers superior stability and security..

i think you got your bsd's mixed up Thu, 27 May 2004 08:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "For one, that's what they're there for; to compile applications. Packages and ports are meant as a compliment to source compilation and as a convienence, and not a wholesale replacement."

I'd like to note that also .. those who create the packages and ports tend to know what they're _doing_. It's not some ./configure; make; make install that 99% of the community runs to compile their new software. Fri, 28 May 2004 17:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? An excellent point. I should have added that packages and ports benefit users who aren't as comfortable around a Makefile, especially when ./configure; make; make install doesn't work as it should. Packages and ports are a good fall-back then.

However, even for OpenBSD 64-bit, most of the applications I compiled worked fine without any special additions, and the added control over the build environment is worth it to me.

In some cases however, such as PostgreSQL, neither packages nor ports nor source compilation begat a binary that could run sql-bench without dying from a bus error. Fri, 28 May 2004 20:28:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? A bit about I/O bottlenecks. You had enabled softdeps, ok. But what about IDE modes?
I haven't notice a link to dmesg of OpenBSD3.5 on your Ultra, but from previous article I've got this http://img.osnews.com/img/6892/dmesg.txt. The point was "wd0(pciide0:0:0): using PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2". This mean that IDE disk uses MultiwordDMA 2 for transfers, which is quite differ from UtraDMA2 supported by your IDE controller (Built-in UDMA2, 33 MB/s max - taken from http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5743). I wonder if DMA2 is the top capability of your disk? If not, and if it supports UltraDMA then here is the leak of OpenBSD IDE controller driver.
So is it possible that other OSes from the test works fine, on UDMA33, with your Seagate Medalist? Have you check it? Mon, 31 May 2004 06:57:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? tony, instead of wasting time trying to benchmark mysql on openbsd why dont you spend time focusing on the new, compelling features of the operating system that your linux reader base might not be aware of (ie, carp, pfsync, etc.) its quite fantastic you were able to read the documentation and get the operating system installed on your ultra5. what would be useful, however, is actual benchmarks on how this machine performs as a firewall. this is a much more likely deployment scenario for openbsd then a database server. also, im curious to know how you handle upgrades, patch management and software removal given your affinity for installing software from source. actually, it may have been good for your previous article if you attempted to rev the existing mysql port with a current version to illustrate to people how the openbsd ports system works. Wed, 02 Jun 2004 14:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Dear Tony,

I understand some of your issues about wanting to compile from source. The thing to remember is that, Ports ARE SOURCE. The ports tree merely is a means by which to quickly and easily compile - from source - with patches added by the ports maintainer to account for the non-portability and often the linux-chauvenism of many programmers. In otherwords, ports are a build system. It fetches the original source code from the author's website/ftpsite, patches it, builds it, packages it, and isntalls it. It's an important step in software quality assurance. If you want to re-invent the portability wheel and compile from an original tar.gz of source, go right ahead - but at least look at the patches for the relevant port, because someone has probably solved the bus errors and other symptoms you are likely going to run into.

c. Thu, 03 Jun 2004 13:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments