On Thu, Feb 02, 2006 at 11:04:12AM +1030, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> (...)
> For those of you who don't know, one of my other hats is being a
> developer for MySQL.  Unlike FreeBSD, NetBSD is not a "fully
> supported" platform for MySQL.  If anybody wants to change that, I'll
> do what I can to help. (...)

I'm curious.

NetBSD is not "fully supported" means ? ("blame NetBSD not MySQL" ?)

(from the mysql docs[1]: )

      General stability of the thread library. A platform may have an
      excellent reputation otherwise, but MySQL is only as stable as the
      thread library it calls, even if everything else is perfect.

Hmm, good news ?

      The capability of the kernel and the thread library to take advantage
      of symmetric multi-processor (SMP) systems. In other words, when a
      process creates a thread, it should be possible for that thread to run
      on a different CPU than the original process.

Bad news. Outright broken.

      The capability of the kernel and the thread library to run many threads
      that acquire and release a mutex over a short critical region frequently
      without excessive context switches. If the implementation of
      pthread_mutex_lock() is too anxious to yield CPU time, this hurts MySQL
      tremendously. If this issue is not taken care of, adding extra CPUs
      actually makes MySQL slower.

?

      General filesystem stability and performance.

?

      If your tables are large, performance is affected by the ability of
      the filesystem to deal with large files at all and to deal with them
      efficiently.

How large? :> (ref. der Mouse)

      Our level of expertise here at MySQL AB with the platform. If we know
      a platform well, we enable platform-specific optimizations and fixes
      at compile time. We can also provide advice on configuring your system
      optimally for MySQL.

Anyone else but you from nbsd community developing over there ?

      The amount of testing we have done internally for similar
      configurations.

I.e. "money"?

      The number of users that have run MySQL successfully on the platform
      in similar configurations. If this number is high, the likelihood of
      encountering platform-specific surprises is much smaller.

Good news again.


To change this status, what (aside of fixing threads/SMP) has to be done ?
Money poured down the drain ? Or something sensible ?

-Martin

[1]: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/which-os.html