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SubjectRe: Good point of Linux over Windows NT
   From: "E. Kevin Hall" <bjhall@neptune.ultranet.com>
Date: Tue, 21 Jan 1997 19:38:42 -0500

> > 1) First and foremost - OS features make an operating system. As examples:

I just caught the way this was phrased, in particular because it
reminds me of a very disheartening thing which Urich Valhalla states
in his "UNIX: The New Frontiers" book, went something like:

"As processors become faster and faster, functionality becomes much
more important than performance."

No wonder UNIX has so many damn problems, because this is the way some
people will surely think after having read this persons book. The
ideology is present elsewhere in modern OS literature as well, and I
think it really sucks.

I'll be the first to pass up the cleanest, most flexible, and generic
interface or feature simply because the performance is unacceptable.
SVR4 STREAMS comes to mind...

"STREAMS are great, look how clean everything is, looks soooo nice..."

... but it's nearly impossible to do efficiently, especially with SMP

"SVR4 HAT is the most wonderful abstraction for memory management
hardware, it's so clean and easy to write support for..."

... but it takes a rocket scientist to write a fast enough
implementation for a particular mmu/cache architecture to make the
enormous implicit overhead from SVR4 HAT go away

"Let's do system calls via RPC, how clean, how nice, I love Mach, I
love external pagers..."

... Let's see you get 11.26MB/s over 100baseT with that system on
something other than a 400MHZ Alpha, good luck even with that

on and on and on...

I hope most people hacking Linux don't view systems design and
engineering in this way, Linus has brought us up much better than that
;-)

---------------------------------------------////
Yow! 11.26 MB/s remote host TCP bandwidth & ////
199 usec remote TCP latency over 100Mb/s ////
ethernet. Beat that! ////
-----------------------------------------////__________ o
David S. Miller, davem@caip.rutgers.edu /_____________/ / // /_/ ><

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