297: Dragonfly In The Wild

FreeBSD ZFS vs. ZoL performance, Dragonfly 5.4.2 has been release, containing web services with iocell, Solaris 11.4 SRU8, Problem with SSH Agent forwarding, OpenBSD 6.4 to 6.5 upgrade guide, and more.

Headlines

FreeBSD ZFS vs. ZoL Performance, Ubuntu ZFS On Linux Reference

With iX Systems having released new images of FreeBSD reworked with their ZFS On Linux code that is in development to ultimately replace their existing FreeBSD ZFS support derived from the code originally found in the Illumos source tree, here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the FreeBSD 12 performance of ZFS vs. ZoL vs. UFS and compared to Ubuntu Linux on the same system with EXT4 and ZFS. Using an Intel Xeon E3-1275 v6 with ASUS P10S-M WS motherboard, 2 x 8GB DDR4-2400 ECC UDIMMs, and Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500GB NVMe solid-state drive was used for all of this round of testing. Just a single modern NVMe SSD was used for this round of ZFS testing while as the FreeBSD ZoL code matures I'll test on multiple systems using a more diverse range of storage devices. FreeBSD 12 ZoL was tested using the iX Systems image and then fresh installs done of FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE when defaulting to the existing ZFS root file-system support and again when using the aging UFS file-system. Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS with the Linux 4.18 kernel was used when testing its default EXT4 file-system and then again when using the Ubuntu-ZFS ZoL support. Via the Phoronix Test Suite various BSD/Linux I/O benchmarks were carried out. Overall, the FreeBSD ZFS On Linux port is looking good so far and we are looking forward to it hopefully maturing in time for FreeBSD 13.0. Nice job to iX Systems and all of those involved, especially the ZFS On Linux project. Those wanting to help in testing can try the FreeBSD ZoL spins. Stay tuned for more benchmarks and on more diverse hardware as time allows and the FreeBSD ZoL support further matures, but so far at least the performance numbers are in good shape.

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DragonFlyBSD 5.4.2 is out

Upgrading guide

Here's the tag commit, for what has changed from 5.4.1 to 5.4.2 The normal ISO and IMG files are available for download and install, plus an uncompressed ISO image for those installing remotely. I uploaded them to mirror-master.dragonflybsd.org last night so they should be at your local mirror or will be soon. This version includes Matt's fix for the HAMMER2 corruption bug he identified recently. If you have an existing 5.4 system and are running a generic kernel, the normal upgrade process will work.

> cd /usr/src
> git pull
> make buildworld.
> make buildkernel.
> make installkernel.
> make installworld
> make upgrade

After your next reboot, you can optionally update your rescue system:

> cd /usr/src
> make initrd

As always, make sure your packages are up to date:

> pkg update
> pkg upgrade

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News Roundup

Containing web services with iocell

I'm a huge fan of the FreeBSD jails feature. It is a great system for splitting services into logical units with all the performance of the bare metal system. In fact, this very site runs in its own jail! If this is starting to sound like LXC or Docker, it might surprise you to learn that OS-level virtualization has existed for quite some time. Kudos to the Linux folks for finally getting around to it. 😛 If you're interested in the history behind Jails, there is an excellent talk from Papers We Love on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgN8pCMLI2U

• Getting started

There are plenty of options when it comes to setting up the jail system. Ezjail and Iocage seem popular, or you could do things manually. Iocage was recently rewritten in python, but was originally a set of shell scripts. That version has since been forked under the name Iocell, and I think it's pretty neat, so this tutorial will be using Iocell.

• To start, you'll need the following:
  • A FreeBSD inst