FreeBSD 4.x or newer is recommended for running MySQL, because
the thread package is much more integrated. To get a secure
and stable system, you should use only FreeBSD kernels that
are marked -RELEASE.
The easiest (and preferred) way to install MySQL is to use the
mysql-server and
mysql-client ports available at
https://www.freebsd.org/. Using these ports
gives you the following benefits:
A working MySQL with all optimizations enabled that are
known to work on your version of FreeBSD.
Automatic configuration and build.
Startup scripts installed in
/usr/local/etc/rc.d.
The ability to use pkg_info -L to see
which files are installed.
The ability to use pkg_delete to remove
MySQL if you no longer want it on your machine.
It is recommended you use MIT-pthreads on FreeBSD 2.x, and
native threads on FreeBSD 3 and up. It is possible to run with
native threads on some late 2.2.x versions, but you may
encounter problems shutting down mysqld.
Unfortunately, certain function calls on FreeBSD are not yet
fully thread-safe. Most notably, this includes the
gethostbyname() function, which is used by
MySQL to convert hostnames into IP addresses. Under certain
circumstances, the mysqld process suddenly
causes 100% CPU load and is unresponsive. If you encounter
this problem, try to start MySQL using the
--skip-name-resolve option.
Alternatively, you can link MySQL on FreeBSD 4.x against the
LinuxThreads library, which avoids a few of the problems that
the native FreeBSD thread implementation has. For a very good
comparison of LinuxThreads versus native threads, see Jeremy
Zawodny's article FreeBSD or Linux for your MySQL
Server? at
https://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000697.html.
Known problem when using LinuxThreads on FreeBSD is:
-
The connection times (wait_timeout,
interactive_timeout and
net_read_timeout) values are not
honored. The symptom is that persistent connections can
hang for a very long time without getting closed down and
that a 'kill' for a thread will not take affect until the
thread does it a new command
This is probably a signal handling problem in the thread
library where the signal doesn't break a pending read.
This is supposed to be fixed in FreeBSD 5.0
The MySQL build process requires GNU make
(gmake) to work. If GNU
make is not available, you must install it
first before compiling MySQL.
The recommended way to compile and install MySQL on FreeBSD
with gcc (2.95.2 and up) is:
CC=gcc CFLAGS="-O2 -fno-strength-reduce" \
CXX=gcc CXXFLAGS="-O2 -fno-rtti -fno-exceptions \
-felide-constructors -fno-strength-reduce" \
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/mysql --enable-assembler
gmake
gmake install
cd /usr/local/mysql
bin/mysql_install_db --user=mysql
bin/mysqld_safe &
If you notice that configure uses
MIT-pthreads, you should read the MIT-pthreads notes. See
Section 2.8.5, “MIT-pthreads Notes”.
If you get an error from make install that
it can't find /usr/include/pthreads,
configure didn't detect that you need
MIT-pthreads. To fix this problem, remove
config.cache, and then re-run
configure with the
--with-mit-threads option.
Be sure that your name resolver setup is correct. Otherwise,
you may experience resolver delays or failures when connecting
to mysqld. Also make sure that the
localhost entry in the
/etc/hosts file is correct. The file
should start with a line similar to this:
127.0.0.1 localhost localhost.your.domain
FreeBSD is known to have a very low default file handle limit.
See Section A.2.17, “File Not Found”. Start the
server by using the --open-files-limit option
for mysqld_safe, or raise the limits for
the mysqld user in
/etc/login.conf and rebuild it with
cap_mkdb /etc/login.conf. Also be sure that
you set the appropriate class for this user in the password
file if you are not using the default (use chpass
mysqld-user-name). See
Section 5.3.1, “mysqld_safe — MySQL Server Startup Script”.
FreeBSD limits the size of a process to 512MB, even if you
have much more RAM available on the system. So you may get an
error such as this:
Out of memory (Needed 16391 bytes)
In current versions of FreeBSD (at least 4.x and greater), you
may increase this limit by adding the following entries to the
/boot/loader.conf file and rebooting the
machine (these are not settings that can be changed at run
time with the sysctl command):
kern.maxdsiz="1073741824" # 1GB
kern.dfldsiz="1073741824" # 1GB
kern.maxssiz="134217728" # 128MB
For older versions of FreeBSD, you must recompile your kernel
to change the maximum data segment size for a process. In this
case, you should look at the MAXDSIZ option
in the LINT config file for more
information.
If you get problems with the current date in MySQL, setting
the TZ variable should help. See
Appendix F, Environment Variables.
