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On 10/2/05, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl@lkcl.net> wrote: > as i love to put my oar in where it's unlikely that people > will listen, and as i have little to gain or lose by doing > so, i figured you can decide for yourselves whether to be > selectively deaf or not: Hi Luke, Haven't seen you since I believe you gave a somewhat interesting talk on FUSE at an OxLUG a year or more back. I don't think anyone here is selectively deaf, but some might just ignore you for such comments :-) > what prompted me to send this message now was a recent report > where linus' no1 patcher is believed to be close to overload, > and in that report, i think it was andrew morton, it was > said that he believed the linux kernel development rate to be > slowing down, because it is nearing completion. There was some general bollocks about Andrew being burned out, but that wasn't what the point was as far as I saw it - more about how things could be better streamlined than a sudden panic moment. > i think it safe to say that a project only nears completion > when it fulfils its requirements and, given that i believe that > there is going to be a critical shift in the requirements, it > logically follows that the linux kernel should not be believed > to be nearing completion. Whoever said it was? > with me so far? :) I don't think anyone with moderate grasp of the English language won't have understood what you wrote above. They might not understand why you said it, but that's another issue. > the basic premise: 90 nanometres is basically... well... > price/performance-wise, it's hit a brick wall at about 2.5Ghz, and > both intel and amd know it: they just haven't told anyone. But you /know/ this because you're a microprocessor designer as well as a contributor to the FUSE project? > anyone (big) else has a _really_ hard time getting above 2Ghz, > because the amount of pipelining required is just... insane > (see recent ibm powerpc5 see slashdot - what speed does it do? > surprise: 2.1Ghz when everyone was hoping it would be 2.4-2.5ghz). I think there are many possible reasons for that and I doubt slashdot will reveal any of those reasons. The main issue (as I understand it) is that SMT/SMP is taking off for many applications and manufacturers want to cater for them while reducing heat output - so they care less about MHz than about potential real world performance. > so, what's the solution? > well.... it's to back to parallel processing techniques, of course. Yes. Wow! Of course! Whoda thunk it? I mean, parallel processing! Let's get that right into the kern...oh wait, didn't Alan and a bunch of others already do that years ago? Then again, we might have missed all of the stuff which went into 2.2, 2.4 and then 2.6? > well - intel is pushing "hyperthreading". Wow! Really? I seem to have missed /all/ of those annoying ads. But please tell me some more about it! > and, what is the linux kernel? > it's a daft, monolithic design that is suitable and faster on > single-processor systems, and that design is going to look _really_ > outdated, really soon. Why? I happen to think Microkernels are really sexy in a Computer Science masturbatory kind of way, but Linux seems to do the job just fine in real life. Do we need to have this whole Microkernel/Monolithic conversation simply because you misunderstood something about the kind of performance now possible in 2.6 kernels as compared with adding a whole pointless level of message passing underneath? Jon. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/ | |||||||||
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