May you have a happy new gear

 Hi folks,

2021 is soon ending with a slightly hotter winter than usual but many events still happened since the last post.

- The LLVM 2021 developer's meeting, videos can be found in the LLVM Youtube channel. Also LLVM migrating fully to github, bug tracker included.

- HAProxy 2.5 released (even tough the QUIC/HTTP 3 protocol support is not quite there just yet).

- The long awaited PHP 8.1 finally released.

Also the next FreeBSD quarterly report submission ends soon, as I write but it will be surely enlightening as usual.

These past months I ve been into custom memory allocators (from jemalloc to the microsoft ones while not forgetting rpmalloc), diving more into PHP (finally above the 100 commits now :-)), still some rust as much as possible, various fuzzers and went back a bit to video games/engines in-between notably yquake2.

See you next year hopefully, wish you well in the meantime :-)

Light in the end of the funnel

 Hi folks,

Hopefully wherever you are, things are getting better !

These last weeks, the months spent learning rust start to pay off and I decided to take a &[...] in couple of projects in github, especially the libc's to be able to make C code interacting with rust. Been focusing on BSD (as usual), a bit of Darwin and Haiku, some of my PR had been merged as I write. Other than that couple of memory allocators crates (snmalloc, rpmalloc wrappers)  It is definitively a great language !

Other than that, as usual been contributing to some projects I look after yquake2, php (the last thing occurring is trying to bring FreeBSD into the Continous Integration's workflow), openssl a little, swoole, mariadb, snmalloc ...

Looking forward to be out more with the restrictions easing and the nicer weather :-) wish you all well in the meantime.

Let's reopen the hubs

Hi folks, hopefully you are still good and healthy since the last time.

Recently, I stumbled across this switch emulator project, called yuzu and I must say it looks very promising. I recommend give it a try !

Not a lot of grand updates, but I kind of went on porting few softwares to mainly Haiku and Illumos based systems. For instance, qemu has Haiku support now for the next 5.1.0 release. Did some work for the usual Microsoft allocators, mimalloc and snmalloc for both oses. PHP 8 which will be released end of this year support these too. couple of video games like yquake2 as well.

Professionally I decided to give finally a try to the Intel compiler suite on Linux in an Intel laptop and realised about 5/10% performance increase, in comparison with gcc and clang, in the Afilias main product DeviceAtlas C api. nice ...

This is all for now, I wish you well until the next post ;-)

No ... I m not falling in love with Microsoft

but I have to admit they have interesting open source projects :-) True they have great interest supporting FreeBSD, that's a given ; but that is a great benefit regardless I think ... While mimalloc has a well deserved "summer time", I started to look somewhere else in the meantime and stumbled upon snmalloc, which sounded promising especially in multithread context, just looking at the description.

Benchmarking this is always very tricky, always depends on the nature of the software you override memory allocation with, you can always come up with a conclusion while your close neighbour would shake your shoulder and showing you a very contradictory output in his side ...

Nevertheless, I gave a try with several professional and personal projects of mine and what I notice usually is ... snmalloc performs a bit better than hoard but below mimalloc (still remarkable from the rest of the "pack"), with single thread applications. However, snmalloc is above the latter in multi thread context. More generally, my tests displayed they all perform better than the Linux's system allocator in the vast majority of the case. I usually played with hoard but the development is sort of frozen since a while (diehard from the same author is a nice toy to study by the way) or jemalloc before ; but those new players give nice extra choices to look at. As a result of my appreciation, I just pushed a basic openbsd support proposal :-)

This week had been a nice surprise to see American Fuzzy Lop "resurrected" on github in the official google account. Indeed, there was not much activities since the well known 2.52b version. For sure, libFuzzer from LLVM is great but like always, it is better to have multiple screwdrivers around you and I kinda like the sense of humour of this software, if you look carefully while it runs you will understand :-) but the results are very serious, its reputation is well deserved. Now trying to bring improvements ideas for BSD and mac I had since long months ; we will see.

Apart of this, LLVM 9, the first Apache2 licensed version, should occur end of August ... September maybe if more bugs are found. One noticeable thing in FreeBSD's side, for the future LLVM 10, there is a possible interesting fix ongoing from a famous CHERIBSD contributor, hopefully will make it soon-ish and I think it really deserves to be backported to the 9's line. Redis had merged my little FreeBSD support improvement, nodejs as well accepted my tiny OpenBSD build fix.

As American Fuzzy Lop would say "We're done here. Have a nice day !"