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:

• 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 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.