[geeks] OS testing, dragonfly

[Vintage Coder]

Sorry for top posting, no choice with this email client. 

Your boot menu doesn't look identical to mine. I have kernel and UP kernel among the choices after the install. The default is kernel (smp).  

Just guessing, since you may not have known what to look for when you installed, maybe it installs whatever kernel you boot from during the install. 

Can you boot the installer again in your virtualization system and see if you have option m. Select SMP kernel? If so, boot with that. 

If you ask on their ng they can probably tell you how to fix this (if its not a prob with your virtualization). This has to come up often. 
-----Original Message-----
From: Shannon <shannon at widomaker.com>
Sender: geeks-bounces at sunhelp.org
Date: Mon, 12 Sep 2011 07:42:15 
To: The Geeks List<geeks at sunhelp.org>
Reply-To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
Subject: Re: [geeks] OS testing, dragonfly

On Sep 12, 2011, at 03:13 , vintagecoder at aol.com wrote:

>> DragonFly uses modular kernels and I don't see any SMP modules. I also
>> don't see many cpu tools like cpuctl in NetBSD, which can verify SMP
>> operation among other things.
>
> In /boot I have kernel and kernal.UP. .UP is the uniprocessor version. I
> don't see a symlink but I do have an option to boot a normal kernel (in my
> case SMP although called just "kernel") or a UP kernel in the Dfly boot
> menu. Can you try to boot from the menu and select it?

That's interesting. kernel is a directory in /boot on my system, and that
directory has a file called kernel and a bunch of kernel modules in it. I
downloaded the latest release which I believe is 2.10.

When I installed I just took all defaults. There really were almost no choices
to be made during installation. I was never asked about which kernel to
install, it was a very fast and simple install. I used the ISO installer
rather than the img one.

The boot menu looks like this:

 1. Boot DragonFly [kernel]                |   ,--,           |
,--,
 2. Boot DragonFly in Safe Mode            |   |   `-,       ,^,       ,-'
|
 3. Boot DragonFly without AHCI driver     |    `,    `-,   (/ \)   ,-'    ,'
 4. Boot DragonFly without ACPI driver     |      `-,    `-,/   \,-'    ,-'
 9. Escape to loader prompt (also ESC)     |         `------(   )------'
 o. Boot DragonFly using kernel.old        |     ,----------(   )----------,
 s. Boot DragonFly in single user mode     |    |        _,-(   )-,_        |
 v. Boot DragonFly with verbose logging    |     `-,__,-'   \   /   `-,__,-'
 R. Reboot                                 |                 | |
                                           |                 | |
                                           |                 | |
                                           |                 | |
                                           |                 | |
                                           |                 | |
                                           |                 `|'
                                           |

SMP is one thing I wanted to test a good bit because DragonFly for a long time
had really terrible SMP, not much better than FreeBSD 4 or early NetBSD.



>> NetBSD is missing SMP support and a nice filesystem to set it all upon
>> (like ZFS or Hammer). I could groan and moan and forget the filesystem
>> but the lack of SMP sucks. Also its harder to configure than anything
>> else and lacks the latest Xen.
>
> I saw you wrote this before but I don't understand what you mean. NetBSD is
> missing SMP support for what? Virtualization? I ran SMP kernels on Net
> years ago, I don't understand what you are saying. We are talking Intel/AMD
> x86_64 right?

NetBSD SMP works fine for standard kernels.

It does not work for Xen kernels, either dom0 or domU.

Xen itself has SMP support so it will use all processors, but NetBSD guests
will only see one of them each.

They say that features is scheduled to appear in NetBSD 6.

--
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com
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