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FreeBSD Looking for People with Lots of RAM
drdink writes "A few weeks ago, PAE (Physical Address Extension)
support was added to FreeBSD 5-CURRENT. This
allows memory above 4GB to be used normally by the kernel and userland
on the x86 platform. Jake Burkholder, the man
behind PAE, is now looking for users to help
him test this new feature. In his message to
the freebsd-current mailing list, Jake describes
the current caveats to PAE and also says
'We'd like this feature to be solid for
5.1-RELEASE, so I'm hoping there are people out
there with systems with more than 4G of ram that
are willing to test it.' This, along with other features
make FreeBSD 5-STABLE look very promising."
MY dilemma is I have a lot of Ram but half of it is flakey!!! so I just tell linux to skip over it. It's really like having a regular amount of good ram. Hey, can BSD map my bad ram out too? Anyone?
I have an HP LXR 8500 with four processors (currently) and 4GB of ram. I've been considering upgrading to 6GB for a while anyway. I'm currently using Windows 2000 advanced server on it, after being somewhat frustrated with Linux support a couple of years ago. I'd be more than willing to try out BSD, although I never have before. Is there anything I should know about this? I presume that BSD would run Mathematica fine under Linux emulation mode, as my main use of the box is just Mathematica crunching. Does FreeBSD make reasonable use of four processors? Anything else I should beware of? And anyone know a good source for cheap lxr-ready ram?
I've had this sig for three days.
Hrm.
.iso's or whatever you'll need to prepare to install your OS.
1) Go to pricewatch or e-bay and buy a server that can hold greater than or equal to 4gb... and buy the RAM while you're at it.
2) While waiting to ship - download the
3) Server and RAM arrive! Snap RAM into server - take existing machine, put aside - plug KVM into new server - fire up - install OS.
4) Test!
5) ?????
6) Profit!
[Connection closed by foreign host]
Their test system with 6GB has 12 times the memory in my 512MB system (with maxed out RAM slots). Remind me again why 64-bit CPUs are needed...? ;)
Joking aside, it's very cool - is support for more than 4GB of memory a first for 32-bit x86 operating systems? I believe Windows NT is limited to 2GB because it keeps half of the 4GB address space for virtual memory / paging (is this right?). At the very least it will help in the interim before native 64-bit x86 machines are commonly available - both in terms of extending existing applications and porting over to "true" 64-bit compatibility.
I'm currently running a workstation with 12GB of RAM. Where do I sign up?
Specs:
Intel SHG2 board
Dual 3.06 XEON processors
12GB DDR266 memory
nVidia Quadro
480 GB hard drive space in a 4-way stripped array
My penis is normal size, thankyouverymuch.
How would you test that? I can't think of any easy way to actually test that much RAM. What would you do, load 8GB of random data into RAM and compare it byte-by-byte with the original data?
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
Umm, that'd be 8 MEGs you got in there, Sparky.
I'll bet it has a 5.25 TB floppy drive, and a 20" LCD green-screen monitor.
From the office of Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf (aka Baghdad Bob):
"BSD isn't dead! The infidel Linux coaliation will soon pay the price for descriating BSD!"
More at 11.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
Jesus... I could even put the swap space ON THE RAMDISK! Think about how fast that'd be!
Talk about a fucking bloated OS!? 4 gigs of RAM? Not even XP Pro requires that much memory!
Guess I'll have to put to use our lab DL760 G2 machine. Has 2.5 GB currently, should be able to find another 2.5 gb for it (Raid 5 memory overhead and all).
How well does BSD work with Hyperthreading? The lab box has 4 HT enabled Xeons in it right now, and I could toss in another 4, resulting in 16 virtual CPUs.
I guess I need to work on my delivery... :)
My old ISP switched to FreeBSD from SunOS Sys V I believe, quite some years ago. Many others did as well.
:) the place is VISINET
... uhmm... red hat, debian and mandrake. Oh and as usual LinuxPPC/YellowDog 2.x on the mac.
Try looking up widomaker.com on any of the nmap spoof sites out there. Betcha you'll smile... they're running FreeBSD AND they are a significantly sizeable Hampton Roads ISP. I believe the MAJOR ISP in HR also uses BSD, but I'm not sure since I've not telnetted in for ages upon centuries (1997
I am too lazy at the moment and too drowsy to check it myself. But I know for a fact wilma.widomaker.com is STILL running some version of free_bsd (unless they changed again VERY recently).
BSD's a capable OS, I'm not much of a user because I do a lot more hacked together work often, and BSD only ran my old file server/ httpd rig. My home boxen ran a mix of
I'm going to ask?? Why are all you folks having such a Unix vs *nix vs BSD JIHAD?! If we are to compare ourselves to the arab world... Isn't microsoft our "evil west" and Bill Gates our "great satan" type figure?!? Jeez people, we're fighting each other so to speak, while Billy boy makes a killing and leaves us hanging. And I'll take my own advice here since I recently forgot it and got into a long argument (I hate getting sucked into politics). But, if we all coded more and flamed each other less, and if we helped out the newbies, I bet we'd start stealing from the REAL big user base out there... MICROSOFT's. If BSD dies its only ONE more corpse microsoft can have strewn over their Gates of Mordor. Linux didn't win that one. Gates did, and will. And who do you think is next?! Damn straight. Billy's gonna take us down one at a time. First the weaker ones... then the strong ones. And yes Linux is at the top of the OS food chain under Bill Gates own pet. We're all supposed to have a purpose. OSS. So get back to coding, thinking or designing something cool and stop flaming each other. I know its tempting, I couldn't resist it once or twice but I caught myself. If you do flame or troll, at least post some info, some resource links so we can check, and then get back to doing something fun or useful that doesn't piss off half the damn messageboard just for the sake of pissing them off. That's just immature and stupid. That IS why nobody pays attention to us. We're all a bunch of immature little kids in the bodies of adults screaming bloody murder upon Bill gates, george bush, osama bin laden and whoever wants to hear us. Too bad we're in a cave all of our own and they locked us in.
If BSD dies... let it die on its own. Gloating doesn't help anyone. Some people put a lot of effort in that project, and if you haven't you've no right to harp on them. If you never even USED BSD, then lay off until you have, and given it a very legitimate attempt to at least get the installer completed. Show some respect, just like Linux and even parts of windows, whether the ideas were stolen, litigated or created, they were STILL worked on by someone, usually someone brilliant. And until we each can surpass those people... whether in coding or marketing or design or even legalese, we need to shut the fuck up and show some respect. If you can't show some respect to those who gave us the nice toys we now use all the time and harp about, then perhaps you'd like to still be using punch cards!
So speaking of this, I'm getting back to my work. Try to do the same. And as for the individual who modded down that post describing the disillusionment with BSD, it makes much sense. Let it stand up, replace BSD with OSS and get on with it, because the problem facing BSD has nothing to do with good code or bad code. It has to do with the george bushes and saddam husseins of the OSS community Once they finish with BSD they'll move onto another project and tear that one apart as well. Just like slashdotte
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
It seems that, 20 years later, we're back to doing essentially the same thing.
Best Buy can have you arrested
Looking at a full rack of DELL PowerEdge 2650s Dual Proc 2.8Ghz w/ 6 gigs of Ram and smiling. But they are already running Windows 2003 Enterprise Server. I wonder if the boss will let me take one of these $10,000 babies offline...YEA I WISH!
I went to a MS presentation when Win3.1 came out YEARS ago. In discussing the memory and swap abilities of 3.1, the rep actually said that you should not use RAM drvies for swap. He said you'd be surprised how many people actually did it.
Ah...the good ole days when MS wasn't completly evil.
We have an IBM machine with 40 (yes, that's forty) gigs of ram. It only has a 60 Gb hard drive, and it's not too full, so putting the entire drive in ramdisk isn't out of the question. However, if the power goes out, the UPS probably couldn't keep it up long enough to write everything back to the disk! :D
LiNUX??? Nooo, Thank you very much. Only FreeBSD.
The reasons are cleaner design, better VM system, better network support (NFS especially), ports/packages system. In my experience FreeBSD has overall better device drivers support. Linux was supposed to work, but inconsistency with library versions and installed programs prevented it to work properly. If you have time you may recompile all needed pieces but why bother if you can use system without those problems. The rpm system should take care about dependencies but it falls apart. Portage in gentoo looks much better (well, it got copied from FreeBSD ports/packages). /etc. And lack of man pages. Instead of 'man foobar' on linux you have to run man, than info, than look over all Internet for help. No problem - answer found. I'd waste my time on something more entertaining...
There are some little personal preferences - I dislike colored 'ls' and mess in
We've had this system for a couple years:
:)
bash-2.03$ uname -a ; prtconf | more
SunOS largo 5.8 Generic_108528-14 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-Enterprise
System Configuration: Sun Microsystems sun4u
Memory size: 10240 Megabytes
bash-2.03$ psrinfo
0 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:03
1 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:07
4 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:07
5 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:07
8 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:07
9 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:07
10 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:07
11 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:07
12 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:07
13 on-line since 03/10/03 13:25:07
Look ma.. no PAE.
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
Well, you have to have a graphic board at least to boot and set up the system, and all current boards are AGP, thus the AGP slot.
Hardware support? Never had an issue with it under FreeBSD myself, and if you're planning on running it, you can always pick your hardware properly.
Now as to WHY you'd run it?
Its reliable, quick, sensibly laid out, and works very much like commercial unix.
Just because you're too shortsighted to see a use for it, doesn't mean that no one else has uses for it.
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
You can upgrade Apples pretty easily these days. This includes the "older" G3s.
Ever hear of the PCI bus? Or AGP?
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
USB is wire compatible with PS/2. Take apart a USB->PS/2 converter sometime: it's just wires, no IC's. Newer motherboards may have the PS/2 jacks connected directly into the USB subsystem.
I'm thinking you can count the number of PAE enabled "desktops" on one hand. :^)
What I'm talking about (and hopefully other folks on this thread) are servers, with admins who at least have some clue what they are doing (else they wouldn't be running BSD/Linux). I have a set of files that I need to search through very quickly, with a SLA attached to it. I need to ensure that this file remains in RAM, I don't want might nightly updatedb flushing the file out of cache, or any of a dozen other maintenance scripts that I don't give a rats ass about how slow they run, screwing this up and causing the next search to run 10x slower at best and giving a negative user experience, causing the system to fail its SLA, and my company losing beaucoup bucks.
We're not talking about a generic file server, where you have somewhat randomized access and you're far better off letting the OS do the caching (Its good at that stuff). I'm talking about systems like databases that are constantly reading data but there are some core indexes that you need to search FAST.
A little example. You have an application that has about 20GB of data, spread among 10 files. You read the first 4GB of data and most of it gets cached on your 4GB system. It then reads the 5th GB of data, flushing the 1st GB out of RAM. At the end of the search, you have the last 4GB or so cached. Now second search starts, and the last 4gb gets flushed to make room for the first 4GB, process repeats. The only time caching benefits you is when a second search is launched within the time it takes to search the first 4GB or so, so caching just isn't going to help unless there are some pretty damned advanced adaptive routines happening. So instead cache one of those files on a RAM disk, and you search time improves 10%; more if that file is access more than the rest.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
Well, SPARC V9 doesn't, but the older 32-bit versions of SPARC did. SPARC V8 plus the SPARC Reference MMU supported >4GB of memory in the same way PAE does, and Sun supported that on their Sun-4d machines, I think.
Apple's OS/X Darwin kernel is a direct derivative of BSD.
The US Government just gave $2M USD to further the development of OpenBSD, because the government uses it extensively in places where Linux would not be secure enough.
Qwest uses it as a server platform in various places. I worked there, I saw it. They have a few more than 1000 people. I guess you could classify them as "an enterprise" type of company...
And IBM uses BSD, whether they openly sell it on their 'e-server' systems or not. I'm working here now, looking over at my BSD server... Hi, IBM BSD server! :)
Check your facts dude, you sound like an idiot. Just because Linux has permeated the Windows-weary waving the flag with "look at me, something new!" messages and all that, doesn't mean BSD has lost functionality or purpose.
I also own a small local ISP on the side. We are 100% *BSD based, and except for large patches/upgrades, my systems are rock solid and have never had a security incident. We colo a windows box for another small company there, I keep it firewalled off on it's own physical network because I don't trust it. Same goes for the Linux box we also colo.
Part of why Solaris is so popular as an enterprise system, is the lack of cruft. It doesn't hurt that the hardware is ridiculously fast too, but Solaris doesn't have directory trees 5 levels deep or all of the annoying shit I see in Linux now. BSD is the same way - everything is just "cleaner" IMO. The documentation is *great* compared to Linux, and the message lists are extremely responsive if you can't find it somewhere else.
BSD may not have the home user appeal, because it's not all fluffy and cute. It's designed to be fast, efficient, and reliable, without being everything to everyone. It takes a little more knowledge than how to navigate a GUI to get it going, but the rewards are worth it if you're a seasoned admin worth a sh!t.
In an effort to create market appeal, Linux has become bloated. It has added everything for everyone, and though it's easier to use, the intelligence required to admin it has dropped significantly, so that when an "experienced linux admin" comes across something hard, they're stuck. I see it traversing more into the user market, but it's moving into the arena of a "windows-like server that doesn't crash as much". For true hardcore servers, I do think there are better things you can use.
What exactly did Will Irwin say? (Do you have a link to his LKML message?) It's not as if there's "PAE memory" and "regular memory" - if PAE is enabled, it's all regular memory, you can just use more of it.
What he may have meant is that, with PAE extended, there are some things that are slower. With PAE enabled, you have a 3-level page table rather than a 2-level page table, and page table entries are larger, so page table walks done on a TLB miss might be more expensive. It might be that the VM code is slower as well, because physical addresses and page table entries are larger.