Re: 7+ days of dogfood

Steve Kargl wrote:
> Firefox segfaults after ~10 seconds.  Chrome gets stuck in a uwait
> state and never becomes responsive.  Libreoffice displays its splash
> screen and immediately segfaults.  Xorg does not start because it
> cannot load the xf86-video-driver (unless it is explicitly recompiled
> with /usr/bin/gcc).  Once I got Xorg working, there were a few silent
> reboots (ie., nothing in /var/log/message, no core file, etc).
<snip>
>   KERNCONF=MOBILE
>   CPUTYPE?=core2
> 
>   #DISABLE_MAKE_JOBS="YES"
> 
>   WITHOUT_CLANG="YES"
>   WITH_GCC="YES"

Shouldn't this be "WITHOUT_CLANG_IS_CC=yes"?

I must say that my experience of -CURRENT dogfood has been entirely
different.  I can't remember the last time I didn't run -CURRENT
as my desktop.  I also have run -CURRENT in production for the last
several years although it's a ruating load, not a compute load.

Others might not agree with what I'm about to say.
1. WITHOUT_CLANG_IS_CC=yes
   I don't think clang is ready for prime time in FreeBSD, or FreeBSD
   isn't ready to use clang in prime time.  I got a new laptop (ASUS
   UX31A) and found that a lot of the ports I needed to install
   didn't compile or core dumped.  (Sorry I didn't report these to
   the project).
   This option sorted that problem out.  However you will need to
   rebuild everything including world and kernel with gcc before
   you start building ports with gcc or you will still have problems.

2. MALLOC_PRODUCTION=yes
   Maybe it's the placebo effect.  Binaries are smaller in memory
   and "things seem faster"

3. xorg, firefox18, WITH_NEW_XORG=yes, WITH_KMS=yes
   I've found that HAL is a waste of time with X.  It's hit and
   miss when it comes to reporting hardware to X, better to just
   not use it.
   Xorg has always worked well for me.  My new laptop required that
   I use the new xorg port to get anything resembling decent
   performance.  Getting KMS to work was a bit unsettling and X only
   seems to work when it's launched by hand from a real terminal.
   xdm won't start from /etc/ttys with NEW_XORG, but I can live
   with that.
   I've just upgraded firefox-18.0 to firefox-18.0.2 without a
   hitch.  I have flash working without a hitch.  Even the acroread
   plugin works for viewing PDFs in browser.

4. Sound.
   I've had less success with this, but I think my problems would
   be the same on 8 and 9.  It seems common for HDA these days to
   put the useful sound bits on different devices:

pcm0: <Realtek ALC269 (Internal Analog)> (play/rec) default
pcm1: <Realtek ALC269 (Left Analog Headphones)> (play)
pcm2: <Intel Panther Point (HDMI/DP 8ch)> (play)

   So my headphone jack doesn't work.  On my other laptor, the
   builtin mic doesn't work because it's on pcm1 and there's not a
   way to make pcm1 the default input device and pcm0 the default
   output device.
   I need to spend some time with a verbose boot and see if I can
   figure out the audio routing.

Ian

-- 
Ian Freislich