[bf1942] BF2 server discussion

[kama]

Sorry for the late reply...

While the 5.3 seems to be the new stablebranch, there are things to
consider. with 5.3 the ULE will not be default as first anounced. it will
still be the old scheduler (4BSD). This due to the fact that ULE is
considered broken and the time fixing it will break the timeline
increadably. In 5.3 there still will be a lot of slow code implemented,
but when 5.3 is released, they will start tweaking the system. 5.5 will
probably be the version where you will see what the new system is getting
a boost in performance and all the experemental feature bits have fallen
in to place...

I have noticed that 4.10 is much more responsive than 5.2.1 under load. I
have set up a system that handles a lot of trafic. the 4.10 could handle
aprox twice the load. I am currently thinking of switching my 5.x
gameservers to 4.10 due to how it is operating with load.

One other thing to consider is that when BF2 is released, FreeBSD is
probably bumped to at least 5.4... I think the 5.3->5.4 cycle is going to
be quite short. There are a lot of things that are ready but not
implemented to the 5.3-branch.

One thing they have fixed is the nasty kernel spinlock bug. I have only
encountered the bfvserver to work with the system in such way that this
bug occures. hlds, srcds and ucc are not making the kernel panic. The bug
happens during closing TCP-connections. And are the program closing the
connection "wrongly", this spinlock kernel panic occures. This might be
the BBO that are making the spinlock on the bfvserver. This server is now
4.10 and people are reporting that it is more responsive than before.

Andreas: One thing that are annoying is the problem that you need to set
the HZ quite low to have the bfX-server to opereate correctly. When I had
it bumped to 1000, all crazy things happened. client-connections got
closed the server started to get laggy.. when setting it down to 400 on a
SMP system the server started to operate much smoother.. this is kind of
backwards.. All the other gameservers get a bump when setting the HZ
higher.

/Bjorn

On Thu, 30 Sep 2004, Steven Hartland wrote:

> libstdc++ doesn't seem to be an issue. All the cod, mohaa, cod:uo
> and ut2k4 all require libstdc++.so.5 which can be distributed separately
> and is here:
> http://icculus.org/updates/cod/gcc3-libs.tar.bz2
>
> The bigger issue is the glibc version. Going above 2.2.5 and u prevent
> core older distributions from running the binary such as debian and the
> older redhat's. If this didn't have such a high user base it wouldn't be a
> problem but it is still one of the biggest platforms out there.
>
> Great news on the FreeBSD front there definitely seems to be a growing
> use of it as the preferred OS for GSP's due to its excellent security record
> and the issues surrounding Linux and its licences.
> With the time frame your looking at I would say a 5x binary would be the
> best to go with as with the imminent release of 5.3 the 5 branch should
> become the stable branch ( or that's the plan :P ). The benefits of 5x are
> considerable for game serving due to the much enhanced SMP core. We
> have been using it since 5.0 and have never had any issues all our
> *nix based games machines are running 5.X.
>
>
>     Steve / K
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Andreas Fredriksson" <andreas.fredriksson at dice.se>
> To: <bf1942 at icculus.org>
> Sent: 30 September 2004 10:06
> Subject: [bf1942] BF2 server discussion
>
>
>
> Hey guys,
> I'm going over the linkage problems again with the Battlefield 2 server.
>
> I thought maybe we could have this discussion now rather than at ship
> :-)
>
> I would like to maintain only one binary this time; so the following
> alternatives are available for the linux release:
>
> 1) Ship with a dynamically linked version and require libstdc++ >= some
> recent version.
>
> Pros: Simple turnaround for releases (this is what I'm developing on)
> Cons: Reduces backwards compatibility
>
> 2) Ship with dynamically linked version and provide libraries so that
> you can set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the "compat" directory provided with BF2.
>
> Pros: Similar to #1.
> Cons: License considerations for shipping gcc shared objects.
>
> 3) Link statically.
>
> Pros: Easy.
> Cons: Breaks horribly on many systems.
>
> 4) Link on stone-age era machine to get libc right and link statically
> with libstdc++.
>
> Pros: Best compatibility.
> Cons: A pain to maintain and increases turnaround time. Also a
> borderline legal case.
>
> So the question to this list is; what is the minimum ABI version I can
> sensibly require for this product? Remember that we're looking at a 2005
> release date. Supporting all the old Red Hats are a lot of pain.
>
> I'm also doing an unsupported native FreeBSD build this time around;
> currently based on 4.10-STABLE, would the version 5 series be a better
> choice?
>
> Comments and suggestions are welcome.
>
> Andreas Fredriksson
> ==============================
> Programmer, Battlefield II
>
> There are 10 types of people in the world -- those who understand binary
> and those who don't.
>
>
>
>
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