[illumos-Developer] Need short help with testing { sed, tr, pax } replacement binaries on i386 ...

[Garrett D'Amore]

I am starting to think I may need to arbitrate here.  Is that needed?

"I. Szczesniak" <iszczesniak at gmail.com> wrote:

>On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 11:46 AM, Joerg Schilling
><Joerg.Schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de> wrote:
>> Roland Mainz <roland.mainz at nrubsig.org> wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 12:30 AM, Joerg Schilling
>>> <Joerg.Schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de> wrote:
>>> > Roland Mainz <roland.mainz at nrubsig.org> wrote:
>>> >
>>> >> I've uploaded a first _test_ version of the { /usr/bin/sed,
>>> >> /usr/xpg4/bin/sed, /usr/bin/tr and /usr/bin pax } replacement binaries
>>> >> for i386 to http://www.nrubsig.org/people/gisburn/work/solaris/illumos/posixcore20100701_i386_001.tar.bz2
>>> >
>>> > I recently posted a list of bugs for astpax. As this tar archive seems to refer
>>> > to a time before the bug report, it is most unlikely that the reported bugs
>>> > have been fixed. Missing POSIX compliance is a big problem.
>>>
>>> Erm... it would be nice to see the list of POSIX/SUS violations. The
>>> code has been tested by Sun and then AT&T a month ago and they did not
>>> find any POSIX violations except three bugs in the VSC test suite (Don
>>> Cragun has IMO the final comment on these three issues) ...
>>
>> Roland, I send you a mail kindliy adking for test binaries and sources on
>> Wednesday 28th but did never get a reply from you.
>>
>> Last Sunday, Olga posted a URL for recent sources and I used this as a base for
>> testing. I send a test report on Monday to the mailing list.
>>
>> A short summary:
>>
>> astpax is the slowest known implementation (it typically needs 3-5x the amount
>> of user CPU time than star) and it seems to ignore POSIX.1-2001 related
>> information (metadata) in the archive. As a result, it may even get out of
>> sync with the archive, depending on the content of the archive meta data.
>>
>> As a matter of curiosity, astpax (with high optimization) needs 100x the amunt
>> of user CPU time to create a verbose listing for a POSIX.1-2001 archive and it
>> needs 19x the wall clock time than star for this operation. Your unoptimized
>> version mentioned above needs ~ 210x the amount of user CPU time than star and
>> 33x the wall clock time used by star for the same operation. To help comparing
>> these numbers: /usr/bin/pax (the otherwise slowest from the list star gtar
>> /usr/bin/pax) needs 2x the amount of user CPU time than star and 1.3x the
>> amount of wall clock time.
>
>Joerg, would you kindly check your setup, please? Your numbers
>contradict our findings and real world performance observations on our
>production machines. Our observation is that AST pax is faster than
>star (and a lot more mature, too) and not the opposite as you've
>claimed.
>Something is wrong.
>
>Irek
>
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