The Perils of Porting

Two days ago, I have checked in probably most requested feature of last few years. Ports framework now systematically supports building ports on multiple processing cores. It is achieved by passing -jX flag to make(1) running on vendor code. Of course not all ports handle this well, experimental run on pointyhat with this flag globally enabled turned up shy of 400 failures. Because of that, the feature was designed as a whitelist. Individual ports need to be enabled, and indeed, fellow developers took on and already started adding required declarations to popular ports like Firefox and others.

If you are FreeBSD ports user, you don’t need to do anything to enable the new feature. Whitelisted ports will automatically make use of all processors available in your computer. If you want, for some reasons, to disable this feature, put DISABLE_MAKE_JOBS=yes to your /etc/make.conf. By default, the level of parallelization will be equal to a number of processing cores in your machine. If you want to override this number, use for example MAKE_JOBS_NUMBER=6, again in /etc/make.conf. And if you are extra brave, or you want to check out all the yet unmarked ports, if they will build, you can define FORCE_MAKE_JOBS=yes in /etc/make.conf.

If you are FreeBSD port maintainer, nothing changes for you, if you don’t want. If you want to enable the use of multiple cores in your port, add MAKE_JOBS_SAFE=yes to a block somewhere below dependency declarations. If you know your port does not handle -jX well, and want to disable it from using -jX even when user forces this feature, use MAKE_JOBS_UNSAFE=yes. And that’s all to it.

Recently I blew away ageing 6-STABLE on my workstation and installed afresh 7-STABLE. While at it, I decided to install Firefox3 instead of good ol’ Firefox2. It worked okay, but behold, on certain pages background images were replaced by random pieces of screen widgetry.

I was desperate.

Finally good folks of the FreeNode’s #freebsd-gnome channel, namely Zyl and miwi, told me the relevant more magic line for xorg.conf:

Option “XaaNoOffscreenPixmaps” “On”

And all is warm and cozy again. Thanks!

Kris has rewritten and optimized various aspects of pointyhat package cluster, making a heavy use of ZFS features like cloning. On amd64, we can now complete a full package build (without openoffice ports) in mere 20 hours. Impressive!

That’s a lot of these little suckers, isn’t it?

(I’ve been slacking the blog lately.) And what’s brewing inside the portmgr’s kitchen? First set of 6-STABLE packages in a long time, exprun with removal of XFree86-4 ports is now under progress, another with a bunch of minor infrastructure improvements and fixes is in the queue. Soon we hope to have a patchset introducing USE_CMAKE, and another updating the bulk of SDL libraries. Stay tuned.

We decided to have a concentrated bug fixing effort, hackaton if you please, this coming weekend, July 14-15, focused on fixing as many gcc42 failures in ports tree as possible. You’re all invited to join #bsdports on EFnet and show us your patches. We will be approving fixes to other people’s ports for maintainers who neglected their own ports (maintainer overrides). There is currently a little short of 400 ports that works on 6.2 but fail on 7.0, so there’s plenty of opportunities for you to help.

Without much ado, our resident gcc expert Alexander Kabaev imported GCC 4.2.0 (2007-05-14, SVN level 124707) into development branch of FreeBSD. This means that FreeBSD 7.0 will ship with a modern C compiler again, and that a lot of ports will not compile on it (unless fixed, of course).

In related news, X.Org 7.2 import to the ports tree should happen in next 24 hours.

Ariff Abdullah, our malaysian committer, has brought the driver for High Definition Audio (HDA) chips to FreeBSD 6-STABLE. Yay!

Half a year ago, when he first added that driver to CURRENT, he vower never to MFC it. Never say never, I guess.

Got a new patches to the ports infrastructure committed, after they’ve been tested on Pointyhat over the past week.

• USE_GHOSTSCRIPT default dependency was flipped from ghostscript-gnu to ghostscript-gpl. According to the vendor website, GPL is the license of choice for the Ghostscript project now.
• bsd.tcl.mk got a total overhaul by Martin MatuÅ¡ka, a promising new guy from neighbouring country Slovakia, who, if I can spill the secret, recently got approved for his own commit bit. The most visible change is that the USE_TCL* and USE_TK* macros are now modelled after the USE_PERL5* ones.
• There’s been some optimizations by Mikhail Teterin, but the patch is so esotheric I have no idea what he did changed. The previous revision of the patch was in the previous exp-run, but only the current one tested without any failures.
• OPTIONS got two important fixes. First, courtesy of Rong-En Fan from Taiwan, the default variables for not-yet set options are not correctly created all the time. This should allow people to test just any WITH_FOO / WITHOUT_FOO combinations they please to. Second change, done by me, makes the blue dialog pop up every time the new version of port adds a new variable that wasn’t around when user saved his options last time.

And that’s about it. There’s ongoing work on the python25 patch, so that will get another exp-run soon.

CVS. When updating a checkout from a local, NFS mounted repository, mind your fingers. If you hit a Ctrl+C in an attempt to terminate the process early, cvs will go down in flames and leave a cute cvs.core file behind.

Now this has annoyed us at pointyhat for too long! First lad to get me a patch fixing this issue will get $4 from my Paypal account. And a chocolate badge on top of that, if collected in person at my place.

Meanwhile, ehaupt boldly went to face the xmms avalanche mentioned yesterday. Thanks!

The number of non-resolved ports related PRs dropped under 700 first in a long time – actually, since January. Whee! Kudos especially to miwi, who’s been killing PRs at ungodly rates. He’s the new pav, definitely. The total PR number is at 5085.

In the meantime, I’ve been whacking on never-ending avalanche of objformat fallout. Currently, there’s xmms plugins raining.