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SubjectRe: Good point of Linux over Windows NT
On Mon, 20 Jan 1997, yuri mironoff wrote:

>
>
> On Sun, 19 Jan 1997, Greg Alexander wrote:
>
> > On Sun, 19 Jan 1997, yuri mironoff wrote:
> >
> > > 1) First and foremost - OS features make an operating system. As examples:
> > > good SMP support (scalability), async IO and security are a MUST for today's
> > > servers. As poorly as those features are implemented in NT, they are practically
> > > nonexistant in Linux.
> >
> > I can't think of any response except "bullshit".
> > Linux has SMP support. I would not call it good. Neither would I
> > call NT's SMP support good.
> > what the hell is async IO? If you're saying that linux doesn't
> > buffer _everything_ then you're just _wrong_. disk is buffered, com is
> > buffered, anything can be async. You can mount disks sync, if you want.
>
> You are not talking to an NT supporter here. Linux SMP is in its
> infancy. And NO thats not what async IO means. You have to give credit
> where credit is due otherwise you're just another "Linux beats everything
> because its Linux" banner boy. If we dont have the good sense to admit
> Linux' shortcomings how is Linux ever going to develop further?

Since the guts of NT are basically VMS warmed over (hmmm, that would make
it RSX11M mk III), "asynchronous I/O" probably means the ability to
request that the kernel start an I/O and send a signal when it is
complete. Meanwhile the user process goes on doing other stuff.
Traditionally Unix-like systems do this by forking. Linux can do better
than that, with threads. (VMS I/O forking is a special case of
multithreading.) So probably the only thing that is missing is some
syntactic sugar to package the I/O thread(s) conveniently.

Did I get it right?

Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer MWOOD@INDYVAX.IUPUI.EDU
Those who will not learn from history are doomed to reimplement it.


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