illumos gate

Testing notes:

This updated ksh has been integrated into the unstable OmniOS bloody branch and undergone intensive testing over the past few weeks. In addition to being installed as the system shell while running builds of illumos-gate and illumos-omnios, it has also been present for builds of the whole of OmniOS (including userland) and the OmniOS extra packages repository.

Through all of this, before and after performance was the same, and no problems were encountered.

Specific timing tests were run for various real world software, and the new ksh performed at least as well as the old (and faster than some other shells such as bash and dash). Some experimentation was also done with using the internal libast memory allocator in place of libumem, but that made no significant difference.

Here are some representative timings from running a postgresql configure script:

old ksh:

real    0m20.033s
user    0m5.639s
sys     0m3.765s

updated ksh:

real    0m19.820s
user    0m5.467s
sys     0m3.819s

updated ksh with internal libast memory allocator:

real    0m19.993s
user    0m5.480s
sys     0m3.815s

/bin/bash:

real    0m24.986s
user    0m7.022s
sys     0m7.666s

/opt/ooce/bin/dash:

real    0m28.091s
user    0m9.291s
sys     0m7.086s

I've also run shcomp -n across all scripts in illumos-gate to check that the new ksh doesn't flag anything over and above the old. The before and after results were identical.