Re: Announcing freebsd-rustdate

Hello Matthew,

This is very interesting, I believe it deserves an entry in the
next status reports. In a few days we will start calling for 2024Q3
reports, but you can send us earlier if you prefer (it is never
too early for sending a status report).

If you are interested, here are status report submission instructions:
https://docs.freebsd.org/en/articles/freebsd-status-report-process/

Cheers,

Lorenzo Salvadore



On Friday, August 23rd, 2024 at 04:40, Matthew D. Fuller <fullermd@over-yonder.net> wrote:

> 
> 
> Do you enjoy using freebsd-update to keep your systems fresh, but not
> so much enjoy the vacations you go on while waiting for it finish
> doing its thing? Ever wished there was something faster and way less
> widely tested you could use instead? Well, today's your lucky day!
> 
> The performance of freebsd-update.sh has bothered me a number of
> times, so over the past few months I've been working on a
> re-implementation of it in Rust. It's fairly feature complete now,
> and seems to be working OK. I've been using it on multiple systems,
> and they're all still working. So, it's time for other people to see
> it now.
> 
> 
> I've setup a small site:
> 
> https://rustdate.over-yonder.net/
> 
> that has a download of a current tarball (a pretty vanilla cargo
> workspace), a lot of information on usage, the differences from
> freebsd-update.sh, and some deeply unfair speed comparisons. It
> awaits your examination, and I await your feedback.
> 
> 
> Here's some quick summary points; see the site (or the built-in help)
> for more details:
> 
> The basic commands (fetch/cron/upgrade/install) are roughly the same.
> There's fairly extensive built-in help for the commands and arguments.
> A number of parts can make use of multiple cores, so you can get some
> nice speedups if you have them. There are progress bars for most
> long-running operations. Manual conflict resolution and showing the
> details of pending upgrades are separate commands, so 'fetch' and
> 'upgrade' don't have any interactive elements.
> 
> Just for a quick taste of the speed difference, with warm caches on my
> fairly powerful workstation, upgrading from 13.2-RELEASE to
> 14.0-RELEASE-p9 with the full source tree included takes under 2
> minutes with freebsd-rustdate (well under 1 minute, if you disable
> fsync), compared to about half an hour for freebsd-update.
> 
> 
> I'm sure there's lots more testing it needs, so I'd be cautious about
> grabbing this and running straight ahead to upgrading your whole
> production fleet with it. But I'd love to know about what's missing
> or broken, so I can add or fix it. Or about what's working right, so
> I can break it.
> 
> It's worked well for me, so it's probably not completely broken.
> I've done my best to make it roughly equivalent to the .sh, but
> tracking through some the logic in there is kinda twisty. I don't
> have any insight into how it's all expected to work except for what I
> could glean from those sh-spelunking trips, so I expect there are
> still surprises lurking somewhere.
> 
> 
> In any event, I definitely want to thank Colin Percival and everyone
> else who's worked on the existing script and infrastructure over the
> years. I'm sure I'm not the only one who appreciates it. And I very
> much don't intend anything in this mail or on the site as any sort of
> slight against them; shell scripts are just slow. Of course, while
> I've done my best to work from the contents of the .sh, all the code
> in this is mine, so nothing in it is in any way Colin's fault, or
> anyone's but me[0].
> 
> 
> 
> [0] It's probably not my fault either. There's a small family of
> elves living in an old ATX case in my closet, who regularly put
> bugs into my code. So, really, just blame them.
> 
> 
> 
> --
> Matthew Fuller (MF4839) | fullermd@over-yonder.net
> Systems/Network Administrator | http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/
> On the Internet, nobody can hear you scream.