Planet FreeBSD

The second Release Candidate build for the FreeBSD-7.3 release cycle is now available. ISO images for Tier-1 architectures are now available on most of the FreeBSD mirror sites.

PC-BSD 8.0 has been released. PC-BSD is a successful desktop operating system based on FreeBSD that focuses on providing an easy to use desktop system for casual computer users. A list of new features/updates since the last version can be found here.

The first Release Candidate build for the FreeBSD-7.3 release cycle is now available. ISO images for Tier-1 architectures are now available on most of the FreeBSD mirror sites.

Through last minute travel approval, I got to come to FOSDEM again this year. I gave a short talk about cairo-gl. Openoffice presentation is here. But a few more words here since reading slides is failure.

I've been promising great 2D performance from open source graphics for years. It was reaching the point where I was feeling awfully bad about being wrong so frequently. So this summer I started playing in my free time with making a GL backend for cairo. There was a previous sort of GL backend in the form of glitz, but it made a big mistake in trying to abstract GL through a Render-like API. The problem with accelerating 2D is that Render is a bad match for hardware!

A native GL backend turned out to be shockingly easy, now that we have support for EXT_framebuffer_objects all over, non-power-of-two textures, and GLSL. Here's a comparison of 3 backends, normalized to the image backend. Bigger bars means faster.



This shows an accelerated backend beating the CPU rasterization backend on 3 tests. Note that things for the image backend are a little unfair in its favor -- we can't scan out from cached system memory buffers, so if you want to actually see the results you have to do an upload at some point, which isn't reflected in the cairo-perf-trace results. Being able to beat that with GPU rendering to something that could be scanned out is pretty awesome. But that's only 3 tests -- for most of them image is winning. I've got some ideas for hacks on the 965 driver that may fix up a bunch of those bars (it's hard to estimate, since it's all about cache effects, and fixing those has a tendency to improve by more than the amount of time spent according to sysprof).

Since comparing to image isn't too fair, and we're not using image today, I did a comparison to xlib. This looks awesome:



By replacing Xlib usage with GL, we get a speedup on almost all the testcases, and a huge speed up on one that Xlib is pathologically slow on (I haven't figured out why for xlib yet). We've got a good pass rate on the cairo test suite, so I think this stuff is ready for people to start experimenting with in apps.

There's much more to do for performance still. I've got a plan to work on the 965 driver to improve glyphs-heavy tests like firefox-talos-gfx (and ETQW and WoW as well). For firefox-talos-svg, right now we're hitting aperture full because of all the spans data we're sending out before the GPU gets done with things. If we speed up the GPU rendering just a little, for example by tuning the inefficient shaders we're using right now, we can probably avoid hitting aperture full and cut CPU further. I think we're missing throttling for non-swapbuffers apps in DRI2, and we might actually do better and avoid aperture full if we do some appropriate throttling. And there's a lot of room for people who'd like to experiment with GL shader and state optimizations to jump in and tear this code apart.

I'd say that the Linux 2D acceleration story is starting to finally look good after all these years.

Richard Hillesley looks at the history of FreeBSD, the BSD license, Beastie and the new features in FreeBSD 8.0.

Gábor Kövesdán participated in Google Summer of Code 2008/2009 and for his work he has been given commit access to the source code. His first pieces of work will be bringing in the result of his summer work into the tree.

The first BETA build for the FreeBSD-7.3 release cycle is now available. ISO images for Tier-1 architectures are now available on most of the FreeBSD mirror sites.

The Mexican government has re-arranged the DST schedule of the northern part of their country to follow the DST schedule of the United States:

Mexico's Congress passed a law in December 2009, bringing the DST schedule observed by northern Mexico's border cities to be in line with the United States' DST schedule. The proposed daylight saving arrangement will affect the following areas:

Tijuana, Mexicali, Ciudad Juarez, Ojinaga, Ciudad Acuna, Piedras Negras, Anahuac, Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa, Matamoros.

The new DST schedule will see these areas move the clocks forward from 2am (02:00) to 3am (03:00) local time on the second Sunday of March, and then back from 2am (02:00) to 1am (01:00) local time on the first Sunday of November. [...]

These changes are available now in FreeBSD 8-STABLE, 7-STABLE, 6-STABLE and HEAD (and the upcoming 7.3 release). For people not following the stable track, please use the port misc/zoneinfo to update.

The October-December, 2009 Status Report is now available with 38 entries.