-RELEASE.
The easiest (and preferred) way to install MySQL is to use the
mysql-server and mysql-client ports available at
http://www.freebsd.org/.
Using these ports gives you the following benefits:
pkg_info -L to see which files are installed.
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
Versions 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 will suddenly cause 100%
CPU load and will be 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 http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000697.html.
A known problem when using LinuxThreads on FreeBSD is that the
wait_timeout value is not honored (probably a signal handling problem in
FreeBSD/LinuxThreads). This is supposed to be fixed in FreeBSD 5.0.
The symptom is that persistent connections can hang for a very long
time without getting closed down.
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 will use 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', 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 5.1.3 The mysqld_safe Server Startup Script.
If you have a lot of memory, you should consider rebuilding
the kernel to allow MySQL to use more than 512MB of RAM.
Take a look at option MAXDSIZ in the LINT config
file for more information.
If you get problems with the current date in MySQL, setting the
TZ variable will probably help. See section F Environment Variables.