Hi everybody, installing software and patching the system are standard procedures of system administration that keep recurring on regular intervals. Especially, when someone evaluates a new OS these are probably one of the first things people try. Solaris has greatly imporved usability in the past, by adding smpatch and updatemanger, which ease things a lot., although they have issues of their own.
But the performance of adding a patch or installing a package is very bad at best and lags behind other OSs. This occured to me today again in two forms: first I read the great performance evaluation of the new T2000s of Colm MacCárthaigh, which also points that out, and then I installed patches myself on a machine which couldn't be updated for quite some time, because of a bug in patchadd and another bug that broke the patch database. So I started a series of dtrace scripts and observed that patching consumes much time in fsat(what's that?) and does a lot of execs: cp(OK, but why don't we use ln or mv?), removef (is this a special rm that cannot be integrated?), expr (why do we have libgen with regex?), and many others. OK, patchadd is probably doing a lot of magic, but you cannot tell me that it is impossible to do this faster, as other can do it! So I wanted to take a short look at the sources of pkgadd and patchadd, to find out, why it is calling expr. But unfortunately the source are not available on opensolaris.org. So my questions: - is there anything being done to improve the performance of these tools? - is there any kind of specification how these tools work internally? - why is the release of the pkgadd and patchadd sources scheduled for the last phase? - are there any open RFEs concerning the performance of these tools? - does nobody care that the abysmal performance of these tools makes Solaris look bad right from the beginning to a newbie? BTW: IMO the patch READMEs are great and unmatched by other open source OSs! Tom This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ perf-discuss mailing list perf-discuss@opensolaris.org
