Patience is a nice virtue

Hi folks,

While I rewatched the Millennium trilogy in between FreeBSD source rebuilds and remembering how I appreciated Rapace portrayed the emotionally restrained and troubled nature of the character, I finally got some confirmation for contributions back from 2018's autumn. For instance, memcached finally merged in one shot two of them related to FreeBSD I mentioned at the time ... the super page support making this OS equal to Linux in this area ... and also using basic capsicum capabilities for the "sandbox mode" (aka drop privileges here).
Also finally redis, after a well deserved long pause, started to accept merging again including the BSD build fix. Since both projects are used in my day job, that comes to handy :-) Professionally speaking, I updated the HAPoxy DeviceAtlas module this week in order to fit better the future 2.0 version requirements.
Once my system is fully up to date, I will see which projects I can help out within the weekend, we shall see ...
Noteworthy if you re interested in LMMS status, there is this topic here you can overwatch, giving good overview what is going to happen...  Also for broader plugins support there is this one. In the meantime I wish you all a great weekend !

Go, go, go ... again

Hi folks,

While leaf trees are falling, some other things are doing the same, sometimes in a slower pace :-)
For example the free doom3 client finally started to branch a new release after more than 2 years. At the time, it was very easy to port to OpenBSD but at least it is upstream directly. Also, golang's project has started to notify about release notes for the future 1.12 version, including my getrandom contribution. But the two releases per year really fits in here so major changes have time to go in ...

These days, I am doing a bit of DragonFlyBSD support here and there, radare previously, llvm a little, a mini patch for haproxy today ... and so on. I am not moving on from one OS to another :-) but just trying to do some "catching ups" so some oses are not (too) behind the others ... At the moment it is the 5.2.2 release while I write, and still amazed each time I dive into what so few contributors are able to accomplish, even though I might regret some lack features here and there (no sandboxing feature for example) ... overall, it still stands up well on its own.

LMMS for now will move forward its, already, 8th Release Candidate while I write (I discussed, with the lead developer, the 1.2.0 release back in early 2017). Hopefully this project will reach its final release in some weeks, while maybe accepting a certain "level of imperfection" (closed source and paying solutions were not perfect too when I used them) ... Audio softwares for advanced users or professionals are complex machinery with more possibility of subtle bugs and there is the 3rd party plugins support system which make the situation even more "weightened" ... so this puts things a bit in perspective. So all for the best :-) because I think this software deserves a good reputation.

Plumbing again

Hi folks,

Next OpenBSD release will be 6.1, the first without CD release. Here the actual changelog if you are curious. A lot of work for ARM architectures have been done so far and recently quite an update of vmm as well among those changes. Impressive as always :-) My only contribution to the system is bringing back a handy function to dump memory statistics into gdb, since there is several memory pools, it was quite lost :-)

In my side I have been pushing around mainly fixes to some video games, programming languages so far ... or porting  ... mainly for OpenBSD, sometimes FreeBSD benefits it. To name some ... AssaultCube, php (the programming language I contribute the most apparently ...), LMMS (the expected release has delays but due to the complexity of the software ... plugins ... that s understable), OpenTomb, Daemon Engine, ... Apart of this I enjoy my article reviewer role for BSDMag and SDJournal pretty much :-)

I have some pending updates, I ll bring those up in near future hopefully ;-)

Better, stronger, faster ... there is zapcc

Hi folks,


Today is test's day ! After the test of the static code analyser PVS-STUDIO, this time it will be a new C/C++  compiler on the market, zapcc from the young company Ceemple Software which is based on a modified version of LLVM/clang coming with an innovative caching system. It is available on Mac OS X, Linux and Windows. It works with any unix project based with cmake, autotools.

1/ Projects to test

To have some interesting numbers, I will try with some software important enough which needs several minutes of compilation, LMMS, the popular professional music production platform ... The tests will be conducted with unmodified clang provided by the system and zapcc, under Linux Mint, hardware is a i5-5200U CPU and 8GB of RAM.

Let's start with clang

This is the output with make's 5 jobs

Now ... zapcc which I just increased the default memory cache in the zapccs.config file from 1200 to 2000. Apart of this, we can also add which files we do not wish to be cached.

 The compilers executables are respectively zapcc and zapcc++ but we can see their clang "inheritance" through the following output ...

As you can see, there is a noticeable time decrease.
What if I try with another source code, opencv for instance to see if there is again a visible decrease as opencv takes longer to build than lmms.

Here, the output with clang ....

zapcc ...

As you can see, the delta is again pretty important ! Good job !


2/ Conclusion
 
Zapcc would be valuable for projects like Qt4/5 which usually take several hours to complete the compilation of all the components. In a professional perspective, the value of zappc is perceptible, usually C++ projects mean important sizes, thus by lessening the time spent on the build we can reallocate this time for other ressources ... But due to the caching, you have to keep in mind there is a logical and unavoidable memory usage increase, thus the settings of this part ought to be balanced regarding the target hardware ...

As zapcc is based on clang/LLVM, it could be possibly ported to FreeBSD as this platform gains more and more popularity in the professional world, it might be worthy to consider this possibility.

tremulous

Hi folks,

I recently came back to my local version of tremulous I mentioned in this post.
First of all, some light code cleanups and buffer overflow fixes needed to be done. It is still OpenBSD and FreeBSD the main oses for both development and tests. There is now 320 files updated, nearly 25000 deletions compared to the original code. There is still some small changes here and there to do but the biggest is done :-) It will be soon time for more meaningful changes.

Another topic is about LMMS, this fantastic music production software will have a release hopefully end of year, beginning of the next. The OpenBSD's port will be updated right away as the current version really start to show its age :-)