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FreeBSD on VirtualBox

Posted December 26th, 2008 by leif

I wanted to install a FreeBSD 7.0 system under VirtualBox, so I downloaded the ISO images (via Bittorrent). However, I couldn't find a bootable DVD ISO image, just the CDROM ISO images, which splits the distribution up into 4 different ISOs. This was awkward to handle with VirtualBox, so I decided to try to merge these into a DVD ISO. This turned out to be fairly straight forward, by simply copying all the content into a directory on my Linux box, and then create a bootable ISO image.

For details, see the script available at ftp://ftp.ogre.com/pub/leif/bsd/make_fbsd_iso.sh

Update

FreeBSD (at least v7.0) is incredibly unstable under VirtualBox. This seems to be a long time outstanding bug with Virtual Box (see VB ticket), which still seems to exist in v2.10. I've tried a few of the suggestions, but nothing seems to really help (although, I haven't tried the FBSD kernel "patch" to work around this bug). Quite annoying...

Raw benchmark results

Posted December 22nd, 2008 by leif

Attached below are the raw output of all benchmarked systems.

Comparing different Unix distributions performance

Posted December 21st, 2008 by leif

Introduction

This is an ongoing set of benchmarks against various Unix (Linux, Solaris, MacoSX etc.) distributions, trying to get a feel for how they compare on CPU performance. This is by no means a complete test, I'm only running a few benchmarks on each distribution, and I'm primarily only looking at raw CPU performance. Also, in order to make this reasonably easy for me to handle, all tests are done inside a VirtualBox virtual machine, and only one CPU is ever used (meaning, the tests don't show how well the Unix flavor manages SMP.


Setup

The test system is a Linux FC9 box, with a Core2 6600 CPU running at 2.40GHz, with 4MB of cache. Each Unix distribution is installed in a VirtualBox (v2.10) virtual host, with 512MB of RAM (plenty for all tests). All Linux distributions were updated with all the latest patches available at the time of the test, running whatever kernel, compilers and libraries available at the time.


Benchmarks

Each benchmark is run three times on each distribution, and the best result is picked from each test. Currently the only benchmark I run is the ByteMark, called nbench. The source for this is available at http://www.tux.org/~mayer/linux/bmark.html . As mentioned before, this not only benchmarks the kernel, it also exercises the compiler suite, and supporting libraries (e.g. glibc). But then again, someone picking a distribution probably wants to see the "whole picture", right?


Next steps (and caveats)

I'm planning on running lmbench on these machines as soon as possible, to see if those numbers shows any more significant differences. I'm also planning on adding benchmark results for SUSE, which is a popular Linux distribution. Unfortunately I can't test MacOSX on this hardware, since I can't install it under VirtualBox. In particular, lmbench would probably be more useful without Virtualization, for testing how well the system behaves on things like disk I/O, network and SMP scalability.

With time permitting, and if/when I can free up the hardware, I think it'd be useful to do these benchmarks without virtualization involved. It's unclear today what impact VirtualBox has on these benchmarks (but, I'm hoping it's relatively fair across all the distributions). When Michelle lets me upgrade my desktop, I'll use the old system for rerunning these tests.

Mounting NFS partitions on Solaris 10 from RHEL

Posted April 3rd, 2007 by leif

I've been playing around with Solaris today, and it's just as good as I remember (except still missing all the tools I need, like Emacs). However, I was unable to NFS mount my home directory from my RHEL4 box. I would get an error like

bash-3.00# mount -o ro machine.ogre.com:/export/disk /foo/bar
nfs mount: mount: /foo/bar: Not owner

and my /var/adm/messages would have

Apr  3 22:22:36 solaris10 nfs: [ID 435675 kern.warning] WARNING: NFS server initial call to
                                               machine failed: Not owner

RHEL4 does NFS v4 (or so it thinks at least), and Solaris is not happy with something there. Obviously there must be a way to get it to work, but right now, I just needed to get it working. So, until I figure out what in NFS v4 is causing this, I decided to make Solaris just use NFS v3. There's a couple of ways to do this, easiest is to just use the vers=3 option to mount, e.g. in /etc/auto_home do something like

leif    -rw,vers=3      machine:/export/home/leif

Or, you can change the defaults in Solaris 10, by editing /etc/default/nfs, and modify

NFS_CLIENT_VERSMAX=3

After changing this default, you have to run

# svcadm refresh svc:/network/nfs/client:default

Alternatively, you could probably also disable NFS v4 on the RHEL4 box.